a lot of people don't know that you can now block instances individually and that defederation/blocking is not really that big of a deal anymore.

I'll reshare my thoughts on this from a comment I left in a completely different context a few days ago:

My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.

Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.

But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions which would make me want to block or defederate an instance. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they’re cribbing off of to respond.