Its a shame because they’re prominent voice on lemmy. Good on the admins for not tolerating this. I don’t understand the point of targeting a person you don’t like on the internet just because they said something that upset you and spamming their post with downvotes. If you don’t like someone block their ass and be done with it. I agree with the perspective that its harassment (and an incredibly petty ineffective form of it at that)
I am not sure it is really an instance specific phenomena. I have two or three users who do the same to me. One of them appears to be a german user I have never interacted with on Lemmy in any capacity that I know of. It’s just internet things.