I wouldn’t say that kudos are totally meaningless, nor your quest to undo yours. By displaying kudos on their article, the author falsely purports to have more

I wouldn’t say that kudos are totally meaningless, nor your quest to undo yours. By displaying kudos on their article, the author falsely purports to have more fans (implied by the name “kudos”) than they really do. By attempting to correct that number, you were fighting against (slight) false advertisement, which could cause other visitors to waste their time reading an article that you don’t actually recommend. Though bumping the number by 1 has a negligible effect, fixing all bumps that people were tricked into making would probably save many internet readers a small amount of time.