Oh, heavily heavily heavily disagree. The fediverse is going to fall apart if it commits to getting rid of votes, because the website it is copying all of its formatting from was explicitly designed to self filter community content with votes.
Not being able to filter content without detailing expressly why will fill the site with garbage, because few people have the free time to waste commenting on every post, but quickly saying “yes this belongs here / no it does not” is much easier and doable while browsing.
Votes also help communities self moderate, a problem front and center on lemmy with the current situation of abysmal mod tools and worse average mod quality than reddit had. (No offense to passing mods.)
But the fediverse seems dedicated to learning this lesson the hard way, so we either need to hold on and hope the ship doesnt sink or start swimming to a better boat.