I'm glad to see that incessant and pervasive whataboutism is welcome in the Fediverse. I was afraid for a few weeks that I had left it behind with Reddit but clearly that's not the case.

I suspect they do, in fact, understand the difference. And are intentionally conflating lemmy the platform with lemmy.ml the instance in order to dissuade people from using the platform, since they know that most people new to the platform wouldn't understand the distinction.