It's not really about the length of the ban. That Chris guy is an industry professional, and when he learned someone that probably looks like this " :nepenthe " doled him out a ban for literally nothing, he probably won't even bother coming back and waste his time. The users there understand that and are peeved that a major contributor to their community won't bother coming back. You might be able to wantonly temp ban 90% of the dipshit idiots that post on Era but keep coming back, but actual adults that have better things to do, and actually have value attached to their time will just bolt.
I also have to assume, at this point, that most people know having the staff take an interest in your community thread is basically the kiss of death for whatever you might have enjoyed about it. Let the community do its own thing and largely self-police for years as tension builds because none of your mod team reads it; eventually, enough people who have beef with the community will troll the thread enough times that things will get contentious and then they can spam reports, at which point the moderation team that has little or no interaction with the thread will stomp in, ban regulars for being meanies, lay down the new true guidelines of interaction to protect innocent 'decent' members. People holding a grudge will proceed to use those new rules to slowly chip away at remaining enemies, and the community ends up either migrated off-site or fractured (the whole thing feels like a retread of the PoliEra fracture a couple years ago, but I'm guessing the Media Create stuff is way more important to the site's traffic.)
So if Chris ends up not coming back, I'm not going to blame him for wanting to skip the rest of the cycle--they're determined enough to destroy whatever vibe that thread had going to OK permaing that guy for essentially mildly criticizing the staffing decisions in a low-profile Twitter thread.