Kiwifarms seems like vintage SA for a bunch of reasons, a couple of which you pointed out.
SA was always more strict and never had as much focus on helldumping as Kiwifarms does but I think the core thing people pick up on is that you can actually have a discussion here. I think when SA was still massively popular and had 10x the posters there were simply too many people for the faggot moderators to crush under their heel so you had more interesting and varied threads with a lot of different viewpoints.
Kiwifarms does this by having an actual good moderation system which is extremely hands off and only steps in when appropriate for severe forum affecting issues. There are anti-trump people arguing in the TDS thread without being punished. There are pro-pitbull people arguing in the pitbull thread. It makes for interesting reading where topics are actually explored and you fucking learn things by reading about them.
SA morphed into some weird neo-feudalist posting environment where your local posting subforum/fiefdom has a dictator lord you have to appease who gets to approve or disapprove of you as a person and everything you say. Filtering discussion down to what a few dozen people want it to be with 24/7 oversight and swift punishment for literally any reason they can think of and no one is allowed to question this in any way without being punished. Discussion isn't really the point anymore and it's just a purity test for the mods/posters to decide what discussion and people should exist. Surprise, this is a dull, boring and never ending process that just makes a worse forum that nobody wants to read.
It's funny seeing FAU still doubling down on the smug assured stance that SA just needs to ban more people to become popular again. "Getting rid of the people who suck" never ends because there is no real definition for "people who suck." They are just locked in this dumbass mentality that a moderator is responsible for the entire concept of discussion who gets to choose who speaks and what they say that will also somehow die Crank-Style if they don't punish someone regularly enough.
The only reason Kiwifarms hasn't taken most of SA's posters already is that the vast majority of the remaining ones there are so insecure and autistic they can't co-exist with thoughts and ideas they don't agree with after decades of having a curated safespace constructed brick by brick around them. Yeah I don't agree with some things on Kiwifarms, so I just don't read about them. On SA "Don't Like it Don't Read It" became a meme used by the people who throw apoplectic fits demanding people/content be removed to mock the concept that they shouldn't be throwing huge fits and executing posters/viewpoints by the thousands.