A lot of the issues people have with .ml are the practices of the admins.
Though also when hexbear.net was defederated from so many instances, a lot of those users switched to using their Lemmy.ml alts - many are quite open about this fact - and just continued posting as they had done previously, despite that style being the very reason why hexbear.net had been defederated from.
And when more instances - like lemmy.cafe - start defederating from Lemmy.ml, then those users will surely switch to alts on something like lemmy.world or Lemm.ee that are generally considered too large to be defederated from.
A lot of innocent users get caught up in the cross hairs of this fight between tankies vs. anti-tankies. People using your instance as a platform to attack (e.g. brigade and otherwise spew forth toxicity) other instances, yet possibly behaving normally else wise inside the instance itself.
Also, whether something is "extreme" or not depends on someone's background context, and I would definitely say that the content on lemmy.ml is considered somewhat extreme for someone on America. Even/especially those who even consider themselves as "liberal", not realizing yet what little that means on the international stage. The content is nowhere close to being as extreme as that from lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net, but far more so than e.g. Reddit or Mastodon.
So I hope I have adequately conveyed that it's not your fault in any way, you also expanding to mean all the other innocent users on lemmy.ml, but I wanted to convey that yes, I would defederate myself from your instance in a heartbeat if given half the chance. Possibly you won't even mind:-), but you seemed interested, so I hope I helped by writing all this out.