It's not overzealous. Wikipedia has bandwidth and doesn't want to duplicate what's already on https://www.wikidata.org/ (which has a much generous notability guideline: "It refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity that can be described using serious and publicly available references"). Notability is sort of a compromise on what will be maintained as an article to not have these you need to maintain just explode.
The part about forbidding primary sources isn't true; they aren't forbidden unless the claim is "exceptional"(what's exceptional is decided by whoever looks at the article), which doesn't include most of the facts cited. What's true is that primary sources don't count towards notability, so if an article mostly just uses primary sources it's likely to get deleted.
Not to mention some of the defectors are also "mods", if you mean admin by that. On Wikipedia, admins are seen a bit more like janitors who know the rules.