And he brings it up NOW, when the mods collectively did something that threatened his pocketbook, instead of when powermods were running rampant on the default subreddits.

While I support the principle of having mod elections, in practice it doesn't work for internet communities because there's really nothing there to fight against vote manipulations.

I do think federated instances will solve this issue though, if the community you subscribe to did something you don't like, there's nothing stopping you from just go to another community about the same topic with mods that you do like, because subreddit name squatting is near impossible on Lemmy.