You are equating "telling a person to shut up and leave the discussion while allowing other people to keep attacking them in some way" with physically and forcefully removing them from the discussion, when it rather refers to a social expectation/demand of a group vs. an individual.

Such a signal is also sent by downvotes without argument, not to mention piling on to a downvoted or flagged comment (people can respond to response to a flagged comment just fine, and can agree with each other about how horrible the flagged person is or what else they probably advocate for, and all that stuff), while that person is rate limited if not shadowbanned.

I can't vote on comments anymore, neither positive nor negative. No clue why, it's been that way since a few months and I stopped caring, just like I wouldn't terribly mind "writing for the showdead community exclusively".

But I know that I upvoted comments that I found reasonable, and unfairly greyed out. So either I was manually selected for that, without any precedent or any communication, or there's an algorithm that blindly removes voting from people who don't agree with the herd enough. Either way, the people who haven't been on the wrong end of the stick much are always super quick to assume that means there's nothing shitty going on. But that has more to do with what people want to believe, not with actually looking into any of it.