This just seems like hand-wringing for the pitiful state of the rail system in the USA. A country can have many dense population centres separated by large distances, making HSR viable and worthwhile, but still have low population density overall - just like the USA. The only real obstacle is political will/public support.
Western China has around half the population density of the USA but is already served by a 1,900km HSR line.
What an awful mischaracterisation. While the dislike feature may appeal to misanthropes, it also appeals to the much larger pool of people that are intelligent enough/respectful of their own time to understand the value of the feature in helping to avoid poor quality and misleading content.
It really bears out in the results. For those who recall what old ratios looked like, for sufficiently popular videos, they still hold true with this plugin.