Very true! But even then, the dynamic is a bit different. Reply-links on a post that's an obvious joke are analogous to upvotes, but reply-links on a politically controversial topic could be anything, though most likely disagreements. Plus the absolute number is going to be orders of magnitudes smaller than likes.

But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot, yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly small UX change.