At the time, I was mentally prepared to take the heat, but not be the ONLY person to take the heat. And yes, I had reported the offender. And no, nothing came of it. To be fair, I understand that the mods have a rough job; everyone has expectations of them and they'll never meet all of them. All I can say is the frustration hasn't gone away, and I would have kept mum about it if others weren't feeling the same way too.
Anyway, one of the key points in a implicit bias seminar I attended was the idea of "whiteness", or "white normativity", where their culture is by the standard to which all others are judged; moreover, a position from the white viewpoint is automatically afforded authority equal if not better than others (i.e. whitesplaining).
A lot of people saying "it's not a big deal" in the whole etiquette thread, and while the words themselves were innocuous, they were asserting that privilege and that really wore at my patience as time went on (especially the ones who would trot out their own personal experiences traveling in China or the trot out their SO). Some went further to ignorantly claim that food-sharing was unhygenic with ZERO understanding that their are common utensil options. Others were all about how Chinese tourists misbehave too. To that, Pet brought up a good point that hardly anybody ever offers to appoint the blame the cameraperson in the threads where Chinese tourists were misbehaving, but that luxury was somehow expected this time (why?). I'm not kidding when I said that the thread could be a case study for implicit racism, and the tragic thing is that this was to die on a hill for five white dudes doing something mildly embarrassing.