We technically don't even need moderator rights to send bot posts to a community, though common sense dictates that you should generally try to get permission before spamming someone else's community with auto-posts. It seems ass-backward to me to try and take over someone's community without permission in order to feel better about sending bot posts without permission.

~~In any case, I don't believe that the Lemmy developers are overtly interested in managing community ownership drama when they can just tell people to go create a new community where they're in charge. It's a bad precedent and bad optics for them to get involved -- I would feel wrong for even broaching the question to them.~~ Apparently they totally do requests, but most of the requests that get granted seem to require the moderators to be absent for 1yr+. There's also the minor wrinkle that communities can only be moderated by users on the same instance and new registrations for lemmy.ml are currently closed indefinitely.