People get heated about all this because of the value of time.

You paid €250 to see Adele live in concert, because she gave three hours of her time exclusively to those in concert hall.

Similarly, if someone spends a couple of hours researching an article so that it has some unique info it it, they're going to be miffed if they get paid the same or less than someone using AI.

On the curation side, giving 50% of the reward pool to curators was justified by the idea that the curator would spend hours reading before finding posts worthy of an upvote. The autobots which upvote without reading are also draining the reward pool - but because some big whales use them, the issue is swept under the carpet.

And inevitably that leads to some people saying, why waste time writing when the curation bots won't read it and you can't get on someone's auto-curation list in the first place?

IMO, things started to go wrong when automatic voting started.