Most of the other arguments are kind of void when you take into account how blatant autovoting is ongoing and not handled with care. You could say everyone not on big autovotes is getting censored with your example.

To then take the meaning of censor from some older definition instead of the one people are facing in this day and age all over web2 feels like you're just trying really hard to make your points feel more important.

I'd argue a lot of people are more willing to check out a post if there's downvotes on it and especially the comments to see if anything was said about it. On top of it all most of your examples rely on people only checking trending/hot and ignoring their own feed of the people that may be getting downvoted they themselves chose to follow. I don't know about others but I barely check trending.

Anyway, that being said this isn't real censorship. As you mentioned yourself people can band together and vote it up past the downvotes, there's barely any in existence anyway and a small fraction is being used. Who knows even if the 25% is written in stone or will be changed later to reflect on how much it is being used/needed. By banding together even smaller users can overcome the downvotes, sure they'd take a penalty for it, sure they could tip the author if they really want his content to continue being posted - assuming the demonetization from downvotes demotivates them from posting but that can also go the other way. Someone may disagree with other people and their thoughts so much that they may dip into their upvote mana to downvote as well and also be penalized from inflation like the people countering the downvotes.

I haven't seen many actual malicious downvotes happening ever since Steem, there I spent a lot of time and potential rewards manually countering said downvotes and I think at this point in time we're way better distributed and have many more options such as L2 to most of the time ignore the downvotes or easily counter them.