I don't think you realize how many accounts would inherently become bad actors without the 50% kickback.
Like I said the psychological benefit alone is more than worth it.

Do you know how easy it would be these days to just create a couple dozen fake accounts and Sybil attack the network by 100% upvoting AI generated content? I guarantee you some curators do this shit already but it would be exponentially more without the curation mechanic.

And then it becomes just like steroids in professional sports where literally everyone is forced to break the rules in order to compete because "everyone is doing it". In many regards this is a huge problem with macro-capitalism as well. Curation largely fixes this problem, which is surprising but it does. We can see that it does.