And then it becomes just like steroids in professional sports where literally everyone is forced to break the rules in order to compete because "everyone is doing it"

That's what kind of happened with the bid bot era, those that didn't get involved got penalized hard.

Trying to talk to the user more it seems they're in the "stop downvoting it's ruining hive" and "downvotes are taxation and taxation is theft" category. They'd probably want something like steem or blurt where just as you say if no downvotes occur the network would instantly become a proof of stake piece of shit where posts are just placeholders to get your mining rewards from completely disregarding PoB. Kinda done talking about this at this point, as satoshi told @dan way back about something unrelated "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry."