With admins, mods (not relevant for default UI?) actively dealing with mass downvotes, stalker-like behaviour and so on.

See that’s my problem here. I just came from a heavily moderated instance because I thought that I could moderate my own experience instead. But it turns out that I have to rely on admins and moderators anyway.

Part of the adoption of the dual-side block method is because large corps want automation and don’t really care about quality (all about engagement).

Yeah I don’t buy this. To me, it makes perfect logical sense that if I block someone, they’re actually blocked and not just hidden from my view. Maybe this wasn’t a problem for forum sites used by a couple of hundred people at most but it’s not 1999 anymore and there’s a lot of psychos out there. It’s nice to know that you can actually protect yourself to some extent on an online platform these days.