The thing though is that while bans are spiking, ERA is not ditching a ton of perms / really long bans yet, are they ?
A few months from now it will be clear if they continue to see growth or have reached their userbase cap though it got very slow already without the moderation.
But I think GAF is far too tainted and gone under current ownership to ever recapture large contingents from ERA. It's been said a lot but big forums are a bit of a vestigial affair. Users will flee to Reddit or other platforms, probably.