Directly, I agree with you: it will barely impact anyone at all. Something like 0.2% of the whole Threadiverse iirc.

Indirectly, it has already begun to impact all of us - e.g. anyone who enjoyed PugJesus, his memes or arguing with him or such.

There is also a huge amount of campism surrounding Lemmy v. PieFed, as if somehow both are not working side-by-side to make this place better than corporate enshittified media. And this gives ammunition to the anti-PieFed side to say how Rimu makes decisions without consulting the community first, injecting his personal political ideology directly into the code. I've already talked to several people about exactly that.

More arguments along these lines are coming and even if this voting suppression anti-feature were reversed today, those arguments will be long remembered in the Fediverse community, similar to how Lemmy handled the slur filter when it directly hard-coded it into the codebase and (at least initially, before MAJOR pushback) refused to make it an option that could be toggled off.

Some people will refuse to join PieFed as a result. Some, like PugJesus, may refuse to participate in the Threadiverse at all.

The ripple effects will be both as a result of the fact that PieFed is now performing voting censorship, and from the manner in which this change was released. An opt-in feature performing a similar task would have been GREAT here! Banning someone who spams votes is also a viable outcome - perhaps after a conversation with them to see if their usage was as intended or something odd that they may need coaching to do differently. But to summarily reject this submitted content with little to no warning is not welcoming at all.