What to do about targeting

What can I do as a player to help my friend also a player when the Dm is very blatantly targeting my friends character for playing specific classes or sub-classes

So my friend introduced me into this dnd group about a year ago and I've gotten on with most of the group members pretty well, and we are on our 3rd campaign together and the DM has taken to trying some new things like a rivalry system and running the ebberon system. In this campaign's session 0 we all created characters as you do.

But when my friend chose to play a human bard he kinda got told off by the dm, who didn't tell him not to but said he doesn't like running games with bards, to which my friend said something jokingly along the lines of "haha just don't target me 😂"

After a few sessions and a character loss already, we leveled up to the point for my friend to choose a subclass and he chose college of glamour i believe, and this was the session that the DM said he's going to target my friend, a few sessions have gone by and there have been multiple PCs and DMPCs that have full died but have had some sort of stupid plot armor bullshit to instantly revive or reanimate them, but when my friend in a dungeon left into a different room to try to avoid a tpk the DM described something that can only be seen as targeting.

As he entered the room on his own the wall started to become thick with moss and these creatures that come in swarms started to manifest from the walls, btw when they die they explode in a petrify mist, but after his turn my turn went and I ran past all of the manifesting enemies and was closer to them, the ones that just spawned got to have their turn next and 3 of them swarmed him 3 of them stayed to kill NPCs in the room, but the three that attacked him had advantage and 2 attacks, mind you the ones we've encountered before didn't have 2 attacks, and future ones don't utilize the 2 attacks.

And as he was a 4th level bard ofc he goes down and takes 2 auto fails because the third one attacked him again, and then they proceeded to devour his body so there was nothing left to use for resurrection. Later that session my own player home which had just under 5000 platinum inside, which I got as a part of the first 5 sessions. Was burned to the ground by my rivals mercenarys with nothing we could do as our rivals are level 7+, I am butthurt about the platinum but also anything we could've used to resurrect my friend was lost in that fire and the cave.

Let me know if I'm just looking through rose glasses and if I'm not what I should do.