This has been asked about for many years. A lot of us posted on SomethingAwful concurrently or before or after GAF so we have some sense of what that looks like. My sense is most of the other moderators I've discussed it with have been slightly against it, but I don't remember exactly who came down on what side. I'm in the middle.
But I just wanted to push back on what you think the outcome would be. It is highly unlikely that a change of that type would free up time or unclog threads.
The bans we currently need to spend the most time going over to clear up misconceptions are ones where people are absolutely 100% clear on what happened but simply disagree with the rules. For example, probably the most common structure of a ban appeal looks something like this: User is banned for telling another user to fuck off and die. User has 5 previous bans for console war stuff, most for yelling at other users. User's appeal consists of allegations mods are biased against their preferred platform, a list of 5 year old posts from other users followed by "See these people didn't get banned and they did it" (in general the linked posts did get banned at the time, but also the users in question had shorter previous records or the things they're doing in the linked posts weren't as bad as the things the user just got banned for), and then a threat to quite GAF. This is not a rational discussion that's cleared up with more info. It's someone angry they got banned.
With respect to thread derails, same thing. The derail is typically not "hey, what happened". I agree that occasionally people are confused about what happened, especially if someone was simultaneously walking the line in several different threads at once. But mostly the derail is "knowing what happened, let's either agree with the ban or passive aggressively snipe about how bad GAF moderation is".
So, I don't think what's driving things is confusion about the rules or lack of clarity about the bans, but rather natural human curiosity and the fact that if you post on a forum all day every day you form relationships with other posters, even the ones you've never directly interacted with. That's fine, I get it.