I remember a bunch of this kind of crap from back in my MUD days, but the first time I ran into it during a paid game was EQ around 2000. Devs fucked up and made some crap in an expansion, didn't realize the extent of their own design, and a power guild found it, ran it up for all it was worth, and then got banned "because." They did nothing wrong, but Verant was (and still is) too scared of other players looking to try to exploit a bad design.
If all that has been done is a tree nuked to stop this for now, then I'd say that it really sucks for those that worked to put the mechanics from use into abusive, but nobody has gotten banned (yet). Last time this happened, a whole realm got close to reset (DIS). Time before that a world got completely reset (DIS, w4).