This is why stake-vote-negation is actually a more elegant solution to counter malicious whales than downvotes. It was proposed all the way back in 2016 by Dan Larimer, but the community considered it a form of censorship and it was never implemented.

Stake vote negation would mean that it takes far less effort for a prosocial whale to counteract an antisocial whale, while at the same time it also means that users who have stake collectively can each commit part of their stake, without one or few having to sacrifice all their voting power or dedicate enormous time to counter selfish or malicious behaviour.

Stake vote negation would achieve the same thing as downvotes without all the collateral damage of people thinking they are being attacked personally for no reason. The kinds of abuse that are possible with it are also easily countered by delegation (which is essentially the inverse).