The Empire sees the Thargoid attack and the following humanitarian crisis as an opportunity to invade Sol, and still Galnet writes about Archer as the raging lunatic/cartoon villain and Aisling as the humanitarian angel. Frontier really doesn't like the Federation.
It is called lore consistency with established character of powers, instead of parroting federal reddit propaganda.
Aisling ethos for how she operates is a mix of social and financial. Two out her three "strong" levers for acquisition - escape pods and rare trading are still disabled to be sure, third are donation missions. Most of activities encouraged by game to Asiling players is about trading, mining, hauling of propaganda materials. Bounty hunting and combat zones are technical possibility, but they are not very efficient levers when Aisling players try to use those.
Archer on another hand, has combat ethos. He is all about controlling population with force. And technically speaking he was not defending sol, he was racing with Aisling for acquisition after thargoids pushed him out. And archer pilots have managed to grind out extreme amounts of merits in those combat zones.
So yeah, considering lore of powers, and technicalities around the whole race, I'd say fdev did quite well with this article to express how in-world this powerplay race would look like. Despite of what Federal United Command coords would like to be portrayed as.
