I don't see necessarily why the forum should accomodate someone who has been banned, personally. And I say that as someone who has seen the ban screen several times. It actually takes time to make changes like not locking the board to those who are currently banned, and, were I in that position, would I really want to devote an unpaid afternoon to writing and testing code to satiate those who are objectively being punished? Particularly when there are other, more pressing things about the board that could be changed (like, please, please, PLEASE make embedding youtube links automatically create a link above the embed so I don't have to refresh the page when I get "video unavailable on this site" errors or whatever youtube calls them).
I thought Xenforos default settings were banned users can do everything like browse and even private message just fine by default.
They can even be specific forum banned, so if you're only a problem in, say, being a massive annoying xbot in gaming, you can still go be a virtue signalling cunt in the OT to get your modships.
AFAIK, era staff just decided to set everything to the most cunty settings possible