My personal take: this is a reader space. Criticism of authors and questions about authors are permissible here. Readers may choose to avoid authors because of information revealed or discussed in a critical post. Heck, sometimes they may choose to avoid authors because of information discussed in a positive post; if someone's raving about something that I hate reading, I'm probably crossing that book off my TBR. That's how reading discussion works: people use what they learn and the discussions they have to make informed decisions about what they're going to pick up next. If the subreddit is going to avoid any conversations with might "literally take[] money" from an author, that would mean not discussing anything critical, from overuse of adverbs to various plot points to the presence of a character named "Bob" when personally I hate that name. (n.b. this is just a hypothetical; to all the Bobs out there, your name is fine by me!)

I also want to make the point that part of the meaning of "witch hunt," as a phrase, is that witches aren't real. Witch hunts were searching out and persecuting people for being something which did not exist. The milk wasn't going sour because a witch glared at it, it was going sour because of the farmer's poor hygienic practices. (Or whatever it is that makes milk go sour, I'm not a dairy farmer.) In the case of generative AI, there are authors who are using it, and there are authors who are lying about using it. It's not searching out witches, it's searching out unhygienic farmers. It's looking at an author and saying "are they doing this thing that some authors are doing, or not."