This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have limitless money to pay lawyers
Since anyone can spin up a Lemmy server, at some point a rich person/persons will do so, which makes this a relevant question to ask.
Comments like this sound like the “they write it off on tax” comments, where there’s this assumption about how complex things must work, but it can’t work exactly that way otherwise we would see it happening all the time.