It's also a size thing, I think.

If a forum has a few dozen regulars and a few hundred occasional users, you'll see some names pop up frequently and build some impression of the user behind it. In my view, that's a good spot between anonymity (I still don't know the person behind the name, and I don't need to) and accountability, because there's a certain reputation attached to that name. If the name has meaning, standing for something with it does too.

With the internet growing in size, forums growing in population and social media... well, doing what it did, the volume of names exploded. Sockpuppets, alt accounts, bots, huge communities, higher turnover of users all make it harder to attach meaning to individual names. Some random name I don't know, won't remember and have no relation to replying "+" doesn't mean much to me. It's not much less anonymous than an upvote.

Lemmy is smaller. I have started picking up on names here and there, forming associations. I remember seeing yours before, for instance. Didn't you also grow up in a charismatic cult?
As Lemmy grows, I imagine keeping track of all the frequent fliers outside smaller communities will get difficult too. Upvotes are just the convenient solution for the problem of a growing user base where using explicit replies to signal approval would lead to a lot of clutter. Easily accessible lists of votes might make that more transparent, but wouldn't fix the impersonal nature of large platforms and the toxicity that encourages.

And there, ultimately, lies my point: If we're equipped to handle communities of a few hundred people at most, how do we cope with an internet of millions?