A little bit of all, I think.
- Many flags have been handled by regular users and the AutoMod. I would guess this is the most significant factor -- what normally happens is that the first flag brings it to our attention and then we nuke it, but during the strike, the content has persisted until it has accumulated several flags, at which point the AutoMod has nuked it.
- There is a small backlog of flags that would normally be handled by moderators
- A few flags that would normally be handled by moderators have instead been handled by staff
- And we've been a little lucky in that things have been fairly quiet. I personally haven't observed any behavior that would normally result in a mod message / suspension (for context, 58 such messages were sent in 2022). Not really surprising; June is not really our busy season.
Perhaps the "bigger picture" is that SE policy requires 3+ moderators per site. If the policy doesn't change and the current moderation team all resigns or gets fired, then a new election will have to be held, in which (at least) 4 candidates will be needed. We have historically had real trouble finding would-be moderators, so it's quite likely that a new election would fail for lack of candidates (especially in the current climate). This would put the long-term future of Academia.SE in jeopardy (i.e., the company may simply allow the site to fail).
Update: Two weeks later, the flag backlog is rather considerable, and the quality is noticeably down —- the home page has more off-topic questions than usual, new users aren’t being handheld, and there are lots of answers in the comments. But, we’ve been a bit fortunate that there haven’t yet been (m)any egregious interpersonal issues that would normally require moderator intervention, and regular users + the automod are handling the spam quite well.