It does seem like an obvious drama factory for people that don't have the proper mentality of laughing at someone for bringing up votes, calling them a loser that needs to touch grass and blocking them so they don't waste any more of your life

Its still extremely visible, that does just about nothing, FYI.

100% this. And so many people still say we need it because it "stops vote brigading." Which it obviously doesn't even do.

Meanwhile this kind of drama is getting worse, and we haven't even scraped the surface of potential downsides yet. I, for one, can't wait until we have armies of AI driven astroturf bots which use public voting vote to target engagement far beyond what is possible with just comments.

If you don't want down votes to impact post visibility as much then change the algorithm to do that. Hell, give mods tools to just quietly ignore down votes entire on a case by case basis. Bothe of these things are stupidly simple and would be vastly more effective at dealing with vote brigades than mods making Pepe DaSilva sting graphs trying to root out connected users.