I've been considering writing about this for a while, particularly as I haven't seen any discussion on this particular community about the larger goings-on at SE and Meta.
I had heard various rumblings over the years about bad policies at SE, which have sometimes led me to back away from contributing for a while. And then the whole Monica thing happened a few months ago. A huge number of moderators and prominent users either quit or suspended activity. I honestly don't know what went on behind the scenes (and clearly people were offended and hurt on a number of sides), but it was a public relations nightmare that made me really concerned for SE. (I joined Meta and made a comment in the first few days over there outlining some of my concerns at the time.) And it seems increasingly that the direction of SE is no longer concerned with the maintenance of its community.
To be honest, I partly have stuck around for the past couple months because the moderators here (at Seasoned Advice) didn't seem to get too involved and seemingly weren't as concerned as many others. I feel like I'm most familiar with them and trust them, but recent activity in the larger community is hard to ignore.
I was willing to give it a little longer and see how things shook out. But the disappearance of two of the most well-respected community managers in the last few days, with only some sort of Orwellian doublespeak nonsense response from SE, has made me truly disheartened. (To be absolutely clear, I'm not blaming Juan M for that reply; I'm pretty sure from Shog9's recent tweets that nobody is speaking freely anymore.) At least if the company is turning evil and is honest about it, I could know what I'm getting into. At least if they were honest and just said that they were trying to purge certain kinds of users, I could know how much evil I can put up and still contribute to a community of mostly good-hearted people.
I came here to help people. I am no longer certain that goal is in line with what the senior management of SE want. Unless some moderator, community manager, or other high-level user here with some inside information can give me a good reason to stay and a sense that we're not going to continue pretending "all is well" with this hypocritical Orwellian nightmare of fake replies "supporting the community" that have clearly been siphoned through three layers of lawyers, I'm likely giving up on SE.
My thanks to the moderators here and to many great contributors.
EDIT: I've already said in comments that I appreciated the replies from our moderators so far. But I think I've received the most important answer from StackExchange themselves. SE has declared that moderator resignation notices will now be strictly limited in the amount of time they will be shown as featured notifications on their sites. In other words, they have recognized that ever larger numbers of prominent people on SE are really concerned about what's going on, and rather than addressing it, they're trying to hide the problem. (Not to mention the amount of disrespect this shows to long-time contributors to this site, when notices about their departure may not even be shown long enough for users to see them.)
Stephie made an oblique reference to how German folks may have specific concerns about certain kinds of activity and remarks. To me, hiding information about a serious issue in a community rather than addressing it is a huge red flag. I feel at this point I must suspend my activity on this site and see what happens. I honestly would not be surprised if in the coming weeks SE management expands this activity to start deleting controversial and concerned threads about the ongoing situation. If anything like that begins to happen, I will leave. This site was created by a community of users who are willing to share their knowledge. Given that words seem to be doing little to change things in discussions, the only other way I know how to let SE know that this is a problem is to stop contributing.