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We don't have a record of "How many times someone was banned for a low effort top level post," but it's not common. Pretty much only when someone is a repeat offender after being warned, or being a deliberate jerk about it.
This is in the general category of requests we receive from time to time to, essentially, codify in minute detail the exact rubric we shall use to decide whether or not someone gets banned in every possible situation, and then consider ourselves bound to it so if someone makes a convincing enough case that "Actually, per clause 3 in paragraph 4, the offender did not meet the necessary threshold for banning" we will be forced to acquit. That's not how it works and it's not how it's ever going to work. "Low effort" is subjective, and it's always going to be subjective. Over time the mods have converged on something like a general consensus (not just on "low effort") such that most of the time, when we ask each other "Hey, do you think this post merits a ban?" there will be general agreement as to whether it does or doesn't. But it's not always unanimous, and depending who mods you, Amadan might decide on Tuesday to just give you a warning, and netstack might decide on Thursday to ban you for a week.
I understand this may be frustrating to those who have an autistic need to have the exact decision process mapped out for them, but you're just going to have to negotiate that. We're not a court of law, we respond to general community feeling, our own intuitions, and history, and trying to keep an interesting place running with maximal freedom of speech without letting people shit on the commons is more important than writing rules for autists.
(I am not calling you autistic; I have no idea whether you are or not. I'm just saying that the need to have all vagaries and subjectivity removed from human decision-making strikes me as a very autistic desire.)
Excellent news! I am not asking for every minute detail of a rubric. I understand that there is some subjectivity in modding.1 Instead, what I'm asking for is much more high level than that. Just an acknowledgment that "providing a canvas" (to use @quiet_NaN's terminology) for discussion on a 100% topic is a useful service, rather than having it be a warnable/banable offense. It's just a change in subjective mindset (and policy). It's a useful service to stand in for something like automated identification/posting of megathreads for 100% topics.
1 - I have made a distinct complaint when a mod action couldn't point to any actual problem whatsoever, but that's obviously also different.
I don't really get what the problem here is. The effort required is basically just to actually put together the currently publicly available information and describe why people would be interested in discussing it. It's the kind of thing a college bound high schooler should be expected to be able to do in 20 minutes. And for this effort bar we filter out a lot of fluff. The cost is that we will have to wait 20 minutes for someone to do this before we have a discussion about breaking news, but we're not aiming to be a breaking news platform so this is a very low cost.
It aids discussion a lot to have a rough draft of the facts that can then be directly disputed, it channels discussion in a less free form way.
Suppose we subtracted the snark from the OP and added, "People may be interested in discussing this because it's a surprising, significant military operation between countries that people are historically interested in discussing." Is that enough? How about, "People may be interested in discussing this because c'mon! Of course people are going to be interested in discussing this. There's a 0% chance people aren't going to be interested in discussing this."
Waiting 20min has approximately nothing to do with it. It is entirely at the conceptual level. Moreover, I contend that my proposed distinction allows us to filter out at least the same amount of fluff. My proposed distinction also does not aim in any way toward turning TheMotte into a breaking news platform.
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