Well, everyone else says that Iran was involved. Though politically this helps Russia and China the most and they are also friendly towards that group.
Goggle standard approach to it, is to integrate it so much with other components that it will be a lot of work to disable it, eventually making it impractical.
The right way would be for those clients to switch to gecko engine.
Gecko (Firefox engine) already is worked on, why not contribute there instead of losing community? If anything why those browsers use engine that is controlled by a single company?
The crazy thing is that governments would be much better served if they would run government Mastodon instances for government employees and enforce their own policies on them, than using a private company with its own agenda.
I think BeeHaw when trying to be a welcoming community and disabling down votes is shutting itself in the foot (e.g. the large numbers of users joined those instances of lemmy, but BeeHaw users could do nothing when they started attacking them.
The upvote only works well when the community is small or when you want to tune the network into increasing engagement (see Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, they know that users not being able to downvote will cause controversial topics go up, and those cause higher engagement).
I am divided, because I also feel like you that maybe this is too much and feels like I'm now needing another account to be able use other communities, but I also do appreciate the effort to trying to have a friendly community. I do think long term this will be harder and harder to manage though...