Well, I know Beetstra. If he was deleting articles that had only edits by a blocked/banned users, that's legitimate, even though it violates at least some of the spirit of wikipedia. But if he is deleting article creations that others have edited, without process, unilaterally, he's violating deletion policy. The punitive attitude itself violates the long-standing principle that sanctions and actions are not to be punitive, but preventative. Punishment is "making a point," that's correct.
But admins like him burn out and become less and less patient. He was at one time, and in certain ways, one of the better admins, less knee-jerk and more willing to consider alternative ways of doing things.
The system burns people out. There is no way for a non-admin to check his deletions, whether or not the articles were properly tagged, or if he simply started wielding a meat-axe. So I looked. Can-o-worms. It appears he is sometimes identifying a sock, not bothering with any independent verification, blocking the sock, and deleting all the page creations using a bot, so fast that it is impossible he is checking for other contributions. As it happens, the page on Noam Cohen,
he undeleted after receiving email. But that's the tip of the iceberg. It appears to have begun 08:35, 28 November 2016, and it eventually became the bulk of his block action log.
2629 deletions after that date. I don't know how many of these are SlowKing4 related, but it appears to be the large bulk of them.
102 deletions, mostly images and drafts. ... then
1067 page deletions in 2 days, he was running at up to 9 deletions per minute. I doubt he was checking for other edits to the articles. And the problem with tagging for speedy deletion would be?
This is an appalling waste. He is not globally banned, but I saw a block on Wikidata. No disruption there was alleged, only socking. Yet socking there would not necessarily be a policy violation.
Is Slowking4 banned? I was unable to find a ban discussion. He was blocked for sock puppetry. Beetstra did ask on AN, after the fact,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive301#mass_deleting_edits_of_a_banned_editor. There appear to be some there who realize that this is not actually proper.
What I come to: Slowking was unwilling to abide by license policy, so preventing him from uploading media files was at least arguably appropriate. Beetstra knows how that could be done. However, what did this have to do with his article work? Now, did anyone in the community intervene, and attempt to negotiate with Slowking? It was sometimes possible to convince a user to follow policy. But the way that problems are addressed tends to be entirely heavy-handed and will be seen as bullying.
It is possible for non-free content to be used, and Slowking was correct that the procedures for fair use can be tedious, more or less designed to force volunteer work in order to make re-use safe for commercial users. Like Wikia?
The policy is to allow it if it is machine-readably tagged. And then wikignomes go after every possible defect, this is what I found on Wikiversity. The purpose of the site did not matter, what mattered was to get rid of as much non-free content as possible. Those wikignomes were mostly defeated at Wikiversity, and I don't know the situation on Wikipedia.
But this kind of mess is what is created by having incompetent management, or no management.