I’m pretty sure intent is part of the laws that exist. If you’re just collating information, I don’t think there’s an issue. When you’re posting that information in a forum to identify the person and send people to harass them, that’s where you usually cross a line. It isn’t the gathering of information that’s important. It’s the intent to cause harm.
I would say most of the writing is bad. There are a handful of interesting quests, but most aren’t. Then there’s things like the generation ship, which they don’t do anything interesting with, it uses the same technology as the modern ships, and also the quest path to end it is stupid. There’s also so many things that just don’t make sense in the universe it’s set in, and it’s overall just boring.
I agree overall the game is just aggressively average though. It plays fine enough, but it gives no reason to want to play it. It’s not actively painful to play, but it gives no feedback to make anything feel worth doing.