Blocking downvoting hides gamed/promoted comments, so it's a situation that moderators would generally prefer. It's definitely the reason Youtube did it; because it was ditching individual creators without professional production values and trying to promote corporate traditional broadcast content.

50 inauthentic upvotes for something no one likes, while hundreds of frustrated potential downvoters fume. Then someone puts up a reply designed to be upvoted as a proxy for the lack of ability to downvote the inauthentically boosted comment, and that reply is quickly deleted as trolling or a personal attack.

Showing the total number of views like Twitter does now is a positively-vibed kludge for people who hate the whiff of negativity, although all of Twitter's stats seem wonky as hell under new leadership. Still, a low upvote/view ratio can also represent indifference or people not believing they're qualified to comment on something, rather than being a great signal for disapproval.

So you can still game that pretty well by Gish Galloping with a ton of broad references (entire papers or books rather than passages from them or reasonable summaries), and lots of people will disqualify themselves from downvoting because they aren't going to click through to the papers, while others will upvote just because it looks like the commenter is making an effort.