Comment by xantronix

At face value, CoCs are a way for open source project leaders to decide who gets to interact with the project. You can't have freedom of association while also demanding to participate in someone else's project on your terms when said terms contradict the wishes of the project leadership.

If I were to guess, the author may have intended "you don't need a performative Code of Conduct" to mean, if you're a small project and you just want to share with the world with the option of including contributions from outsiders in the future, you don't need to have a CoC right out the gate until there are situations that have already been encountered. No need to wrack your brain on purely hypothetical problems.