It really went in here, hum.
Before the current spread in many media areas (as noted before), the context of pepe in 2016ish was in a really toxic environment//in favorable or common use by hate groups/4chan--commonly using reductivity, dismissiveness, and bad faith to spread tones from bigotry to worse. Didn't help that many depictions were worsened from where they were taken to make fun of others espefiallt marginalized people or mis/disrepresent their arguments. The artist who made the character had to kill the character off and such, seeing the impact and common use of their work. Excusing any of this as "any symbol can be used for hate" can literally miss...that it was already done and has impacted tons of people; people don't just do this. That was all before Twitch and other platforms got immersed with it by cultural drift, commonly from the same people who would spread it as if innocuous later on and would notably somehow cling to or insist upon its use over others. My badly done notes at 5am having only mediocre experience tracking symbols here. But it doesn't even matter if people remember that time--what matters is that there was something important mentioned.
If innocuous, the best idea to work with is going "Why" and then having detail on why, and then moving with that. If it's so common as plainly washed in the OP, then realizing "perhaps there's a reason why there's this manner of action", like any good faith approach would bring to any reasonable person, much less someone in the position of a public discord moderator. That stuff is stressful and nobody in experience becomes one effectively considering Dwarf Fortress' publisher, gauging their own mental health.
The issue isn't with Kitfox but the persistence to stand upon this as if it matters when... there's Literally Any Other Art present and absolutely no restriction to choosing otherwise espefially when notified about it. It's even mentioned how many times in the server itself--initially the admin folks thought it wasn't as needed to uphold but then it became a wonderful unintentional litmus test as people who worked with decency and genuineness would generally go "oh" after asking "why" and basically Not Do The Thing when it becomes known it factually affects people negatively, and in a server like that, community-building is a focus. As anyone would detail IN GOOD FAITH: People don't need to even bring up the swastika (or non-eurocentric ones) to realize, actually, hate continues on today and perhaps being an international (or even local) context still perhaps has people affected. That there is a significant intensity to it is in the very least important to recognize, unless one's sense of "I'm not affected" is somehow more important than...others' concerns.
So basically it all depends on how much you care about other people vs "you bothering about it". Pretty annoyed that contextual details keep getting washed away by omission, but that's the power of time and memory and repeating something else rather than be accountable and learn. You can do better; there's a lot of space for it. There's more than "regret" there.