They could make the authors of the posts beneficiaries, who often earn less than the curation report, but then they would lose the farming.

I think there are ones that already do that, at least a few.

These practices have even been copied by tiny projects that vote for pennies, and there are even individual users who publish their reports

Yeah that is a bit of non-sense. But that downvote button is there for this. We stigmatized downvoting too much and now most of people is afraid of casting a downvote.

@username/trail

Didn't even know this was a feature to be honest. Like this is my first time seeing it.