Thanks for your kind words, despite our differences on this.

I get that people want to show support and encourage each other. There's a point, though, where it gets indiscriminate and wasteful.

In my analysis of voting patterns I think it's pretty clear that this intervention only impacts a tiny number of people and that the quota level is set so that 99.98% of people (or 98% if you ignore the less-engaged users (why, tho?)) will almost never use up their quota.

You're in that 0.02% so it feels different for you.

There are a ton of other ways to support the fediverse. Find interesting content to post, write nice comments, moderate some communities, improve the docs for Lemmy, translate the UI, report a bug in the issue tracker, report spammers, spread the word on mainstream social media, donate money, and so on. Get creative.