Originated and enabled well before there were other active Lemmy instances or possibly even federation of any sort. It was put in place to stop anti-trans harassment.
Plus AFAIK it’s only truly applicable within Hexbear itself. The main effect it has is that a Hexbear user can’t downvote anything on any instance with their account.
Mullenweg has been blocking WP Engine hosting’s access to .org resources, and even stripping them of access to plugins they distribute there. Not the biggest fan of WP Engine from what I saw in their Advanced Custom Fields plugin buyout (they messed with the existing licensing and focused on monetizing the crap out of it), but things aren’t alright in the WP universe.