Depending on your definition, this actually is not peak performance.
Subways are.
Obviously, the tunnels are absurdly expensive, but nothing moves as many people as quickly around a city as a subway.
They’re also extremely reliable, meaning people are even more likely to actually use them, and their above-ground footprint is essentially zero.
The point of federation is not to prevent tyrants.
The point is the option to exclude or include any instance due to whatever metric you want.
If you don’t like tyrants, you can defederate your instance from any tyrant-ruled instance.
And, obviously, you can run your own instance as tyrannical or democratic as you want - users who don’t like that are free to leave, instance-owners who don’t like that are free to defecate from you.
If you’re just a user on the relevant instance, all you can do ist petition the people who have that power.
I understand that’s basically what you’re trying to do, but your argument shouldn’t be about federation or lemmy’s inherent structure - the question should be “is anyone else annoyed by that behavior?”