Some thoughts after reading the responses:

Being a clown isn't relevant to the very real chilling effect he's had on developers working on Bitcoin Core. The financial toll of his BS is calculable (many $ millions) but the mental health toll is not. There were some actual issues to be tried here about the duty of open source developers but it doesn't look like this will play out long enough to litigate those.

I think a real reason that he has got so far in this farce is that he is a clown, but it took some people with deep pockets that were willing to sink their time and money into this to achieve this result. It's easy to dismiss him but someone had to invest in putting a stop to it.