No, that's not right. The downvotes were always about rewards. The "flag" thing and listed types of abuse thing was added in the UI by the former owner of the web site, with no community discussion and frankly no useful thought process. The actual inventor of the blockchain was against it.
My 'proposal' was to revert that insane idea, it wasn't anything new. It certainly didn't "bring us" to anything, because these issues were always there, and motivated the entire debate even back then.
Nobody is "demonetizing" you in the same sense as centralized platforms. That is ad revenue, which you are free to continue to accept (by putting ads in your posts), and sure enough the blockchain gives you an open permissionless way to receive that revenue which no one is going to block. If you want to be paid by stakeholder inflation, that's something ELSE, which doesn't exist on centralized platforms, and stakeholders necessarily are going to be "voting on paying it", not just "paying it by voting".
In case you don't believe me, you can go look here at the site in 2016. Downvote button right there. Only later was the dumb "flag abuse" idea pushed out.
RE: After dedicating 5.5 years to Hive/Steem, I've been informed by KING ACIDYO that I added no value