I am not quoting you, I am summarizing your words. 

It wasn't a change to populate the servers, it was changed to be reasonable and less punishing for something that people did not do. It is still up to server admins to issue local bans on players they disagree with regarding to our ban/clean opinion which is what they do very often anyway.

The thread you linked is talking about a specific case that raised an internal discussion and overhaul of the linked account practice.  The problem was with the different interpretation of the linked account policy even among the staff. The linked account ban was supposed to be usually issued based on time/location and some staff members (including myself) sometimes overlooked and went full banhammer mode on any linked accounts they saw on the list, disregarding the metrics, thus banning absolutely innocent people as a result of it.

If I understand what Scavanger is saying there it is a wrong approach. I personally always tried to go for identifying the person behind the account when the original cheating occurred and then trace his activity if possible and ban those accounts. 

Let me show you it on a diagram. Player A, Player B and Player C have a bunch of accounts and play the game. At some point Player A used cheats on Account A1. We use it as a starting point to identify that person, whatever metrics he has. We see in our system that in addition to Account A1 he also used/possessed Account A2 and A3. These accounts get banned for Linked Account. At some point later a new Linked account get resurfaced in our system that we see Player A had access to. This account was Account B0 that based on our data belonged to Player B. Player A shared/stole Account B0 and used cheats on it. Because we see that the person using that account was Player A we banned Account B0 as Linked Account to Player A. But because Player B is innocent (again, according to our data) and we do not see any cheats used on any of his other Account B1/B2/B3 we will not ban those accounts. When Player B comes to appeal his ban on Account B0 that account ban tag will be changed from "Linked Account" to "Hacked Account". Slightly different example with Player C that shared/stolen his account with Player A but we did not see evidence of cheats being used on Account C0. We will ban the account to prevent Player A from continuing using it. And we will not ban Account C1/C2 that are linked to C0. But when a Player C comes to appeal this ban and shows proofs the account is now in his possession he will get an unban on that Account C0.

According to what was said by Scavanger in that post before and what you personally seem to prefer - all these "white" accounts would get banned. Even tho neither Player B nor Player C did anything wrong. And now ask yourself, is that really what you would want to do? Is that fair?

A sign of a healthy service is to be flexible and continuously improve their service, policies and practices. And we aren't lawyers to go full bananas with explicit/implicit statements and neither we get any money for doing our job. Yes, we make mistakes sometimes but we strive to maintain full transparency of our practices and learn from our mistakes continuously, and improve of course. And there is no perfect solution to any of it anyway. But one must focus on mitigating the imperfections.

I get it.