I agree. There’s also just no reason to give Meta the benefit of the doubt here. Bug or not they’ve done nothing to earn such a charitable response from anyone.
Not only is PixelFed not a competitor in terms of users, but the dev is desperate to cooperate and welcome Meta to the Fediverse. So it doesn't represent any kind of threat for the company's goals, at least at the moment.
See how quick he was in defending meta after they came with the bug excuse and how quickly he's adding threads to the fediverse datebase to the point that the clone of Zuckerberg's account that cannot even fully interact yet is called "the most popular fediverse account"
They've demonstrated that they have a global blacklist of terms, and that some competing services are on it. It could have been an accident (though I'm not sure how), but it certainly wasn't a bug. The blacklist is clearly working just fine.