Honestly, shit like this is why I set up my own lemmy instance where down votes are disabled. It's built in configuration option, but very, very few instances have it set.
In practice it works pretty well. Popular stuff rises faster than unpopular stuff, but people don't get shit on for valid but unpopular opinions. It also means you can't down vote yourself, but the counter to that is to just up vote other things. So much less toxicity and more positivity - I can really recommend it.