I think the advantages of multiple communities outweighs the advantages of consolidating. Especially since things can be cross posted between the multiple communities easily

No longer able to access the content is referring to the federation. And the difficult to move off is referring to for example communities that have been attempting to get traction to move off of lemmy.ml

Not posting in the community doesn’t mean people there don’t interact with it. I have beehaw as an example on hand but im sure there’s other federation examples

I think its the kind of subject matter that fits programming.dev well and relying on outside instances for programming content with no mirror on our own site makes us too reliant on those other instances if anything happens in the future (e.g. extreme case but if that instance goes down. Lemmy handles it terribly since the community still exists as a ghost community with no federation but still viewable)

With similar logic we have a lot of the same communities as lemmy.ml communities including programmer_humor, opensource, etc. To give people an alternative spot to the lemmy.ml communities and so that we aren’t overly reliant on other infrastructure we can’t control within our instances subject matter