Fear of losing votes is a choice. You should think about author rewards as an icing on a cake - good to have, but ultimately the fact that you could express yourself and share with others is the most important part. That way you won't be self censoring for fear of being downvoted. There is the reputation issue, that when you are downvoted too much, your reputation might go down and your visibility will decrease, however reputation only goes down if the user downvoting you has higher reputation. You can also safeguard against it by making separate account for controversial topics - main account where you talk about butterflies and rainbows, and how you spent your vacation, and another account where you discuss whatever you fear might cause backlash.

Personally I don't like the fact that reputation is global - one value for whole system. It should be individual, everyone should be able to rate others within their social circle. However it is problematic on technical level - too much data to handle on a single server (tracking results of all interactions of each individual account with every other account). It would basically require being able to run your own Hive node (very easy now) as well as HAF/Hivemind (requires serious advancements in aggressive pruning to be feasible).

As for the "harder to be canceled on web2", I definitely disagree. First, web2 companies only care about money. Their algos have interest of advertisers in mind, not yours, so if they detect that you might be controversial in a bad way, you'll get shadow banned at the very least. Second, I've heard (as I don't have any web2 account myself) that currently social media gravitate towards TikTok model of engagement, where your interactions with real people, particularly people of your own choosing (friends and relatives), are seen as not engaging enough to be main part of what algos decide to show to you. It is no longer about connecting people of the same interests or wanting to discuss shared topics, it is now about you staring at the screen and swiping mindlessly through mass produced content interrupted with ads.