Pepe is a red flag. Not enough to ban outright with no other context, but when posted by a user who is posting bigotry elsewhere, it warrants a removal
It’s great you’ve got such a strong moral compass and are an authority on bigotry that can recognize it and weed it out, you could have been an insane person high on the miniscule amount of power tending a pile of shitposts, removing humour because of ideology. All of us the Internet really dodged a bullet there.
Because it’s shit made to drive engagement, not worth anything. Unlike reddit which views you as assets to make it money and incentivises use, lemmy owners pay for the bandwidth, don’t get anything from out shitposts and if anything it would be in their interest to disincentivise use.