You are obviously correct that the more value this tool has, the more work bad actors will do to take advantage of that, reducing the quality of the result. How

You are obviously correct that the more value this tool has, the more work bad actors will do to take advantage of that, reducing the quality of the result. However, I do think Reddit is more resistant to it than some other platforms due to the large amount of distributed work done by the participants. Assuming that a given subreddit is moderated in such a way that the vast majority of participants are individuals interested in high quality products then the Reddit voting system does help to keep other stuff out.