/banlist only tells you how many usernames/IPs are banned.

to answer one of your questions, this is how it has always been as far as i know, and also while it would be kinda nice i guess to be able to check the ban list from ingame, it also seems like quite a hassle because then you either have your chat absolutely flooded or you have like 156 pages of bans, so yeah.

There was a window of time in 2019-2020 in which you could view real-time bans using a module in the HTTPD server, as bans were still stored in a YAML file. However, this HTTPD module stopped working after we started migrating our data to SQL databases.

Note that this can be (and has been) problematic in specific cases where it's uncertain if someone has already been banned and banning them again would have unintentional rollback-related consequences. (Oops, Tizz91...)

Checking the ban list from ingame is not as convenient as it sounds because the Minecraft chat only has a limited amount of space. The tool that was previously used for this is the bans HTTPD module, as mentioned by Video. Because of the rough developer transition, the task of fixing this module never ended up on the current developer to-do list. I definitely think it should be added there, though.

pretty sure bans and tbans still show up in the punishments section of HTTPD, but i may be wrong

@Ashaz#10290 I am fairly certain that new ones are also there, so idk, pretty sure devs are actively working on the ban page anyways (although the message that is still on that page is from when seth did migration to sql so, yeah)

I've raised FS-167 to add some sort of player name / partial player name as a query to /banlist to look it up against MySQL. There's work scoped to overhaul HTTPD and this will long term probably fall into that work.