While it’s true that the downvote often gets abused as a way to stifle otherwise-good discussion, without it it’s hard to deal with discussion that truly should NOT be happening.
There’s a reason election denial is more common and looks more legitimate on Facebook and Twitter. It’s because they don’t have a mechanism for people to nuke that discussion out of the top of the thread.
You don’t even need “power hungry mods” for that to go wrong, you just need mods who don’t care. That’s EXACTLY where Facebook and Twitter are right now. Getting content removed there is basically impossible, I’ve reported people for death threats and was told they never violated community standards.
If the platform isn’t going to moderate itself, the users should be able to.