No worries! Asking questions means you resonate on this. I am no professional, I have just lived with this for so long, both online and off. (That’s my disclaimer of ‘take my words as you wish and I take no responsibility after the fact’. Heh.)
What you describe happened to me recently. It depends on the individual that the community wishes to drive out. Any kind of community uprising not publicly (as in, some kind of announcement, even if temporarily posted) sanctioned by the community owner (and an owner that treated the dissident with some kind of compassion that was the drive to remove them) will cause so much strife down the line that the community probably gave itself its own death sentence. It also depends if the user has a polarizing personality. I am this to the core and I have been told this many times by different people (either friends or third parties that have no empathetic connection to me). For communities I was heavily involved in and helped, my sudden leave from a community (where an upheaval happened from a group that despised me) leaves a kind of buzz in the air. It’s jarring. It makes some wonder “huh, maybe something is going on here…” and that sticks somewhere in the recesses of their mind. It becomes the hindsight they exclaim when something big happens that directly relates to why I left in the first place.
People like me will either write things against that community elsewhere (like a blog or writing into other sites as editorials). I always say “they may have won that battle, but I will win this war”. Or they may do other highly nefarious things if they are not to a level of self-moderating maturity such as myself. Like cracking and Denial of Service attacks. If there’s a will? Oh yes. People like me find a way. I consider myself a benevolent psychopath in an attempt to describe what kind of mental problems I face. Of course, my views and thoughts cannot be taken as a constant and applied to every scenario. As before: Human nature is so varied and that depends on levels of extremism percolating under someone’s placid surface. I would like to think I am on the right track based on my life experiences.