He seems to be following the letter of the rules. I'd say he's ignoring the
spirit--except that obviously some people think deletionism is in the
spirit of the rules too. In fact, often the rules are made unclear so that
different people can "agree" on them in the first place, which makes it hard
to tell what the spirit of the rules ever was.
I certainly think this behavior *shouldn't* be allowed, but it's hard to see
how not to allow it without changing the rules. The letter of the rules is
badly broken:
* The AFDs are discussed and approved outside the affected pages. Some people
see this as a feature. (Mentioned in the amendment request preceding this)
* Once the articles are removed, he benefits from status quo. It's a lot
harder to contest an AFD after the fact.
* Making large numbers of basically similar changes makes it hard to contest
all the changes at once.
* A merge is not officially a deletion. We really need to give up on these
legal fictions.
(Variations on the first three happened for spoiler warnings too. This isn't
coincidence.)
Though despite all this, the Barrett v. Rosenthal RFA further down the page
is pretty scary all on its own.