So as an update, Hexbear have defederated us after a brief chat I had with an admin. They updated their instance on it here:

Removed lemmy.nz from our allow-list due to irreconcilable political differences between the instances. As well as them committing to permanently blocking hexbear.net

https://hexbear.net/comment/3833816

That's not quite how I remember the conversation going, in fact I feel like I said it wasn't permanent (or at least that's what I was trying to imply):

Thanks for reaching out. I do intend to monitor the situation, in particular when more granular tools are available. But for the moment I think we will just watch from the side lines.

But hey, it is what it is.