> explicit that it doesn't appear to have left any leeway for common sense. Why did they simply follow the explicit procedures of the CoC rather than stopping to question if what they were doing was the right thing to do?

It's good that they blindly applied their CoC in a case where it's clear-cut that it's bad, since it revealed the problems with the CoC. If they chose not to enforce it in this instance, then when a more political issue inevitably came up down the road, a similar bad result may have happened but without the backlash necessary to fix it.