I feel like Cancel Culture is mostly fueled by the elites.
Think about it. They encourage people to 'cancel' rich and powerful people by basically saying: "Oh no, don't you dare be mean to me online, otherwise I'll give you validation by complaining about you in a very public way," which gets them a boost in every way that matters to them, from being given opportunities like appearing on podcasts, having articles written about the drama that paints them in a good light, and a flood of positive comments from white knights online.
But, it only works on the people with money and influence, of course. We're not supposed to 'harass' the poor people who don't have many followers, and you certainly wouldn't want to signal-boost them because it might attract the meanies that will say mean things to them. Only the elite can handle the tremendous burden of having mean comments directed at them.
Personally, if someone's being mean to me and sending me death threats, legal threats, or even just being annoying, I could absolutely make a big spectacle of it for fun because I find arguing with people, or just sensibly debating people, to be fun, but also... I could just block them, and I could report death threats. I dunno, I've always found it sus how people are always posting publicly like "OMG, I got so many death threats," because, like, death threats, specifically, are like the greatest gift a hater can give you because then you can get the police involved.
Like, I wish that I had people leaving comments being like "This is a piece of shit, and you suck," or "This is so cringe, lol," because it does give me the opportunity to change their minds if they're open to it, or just give me a morality boner as I can be like "It's okay, I forgive you for being mean to me." I'd obviously prefer to receive positive comments, but it's not like I'm going to cry if I receive a negative comment. What bothers me is mainly that if I release a project and the only comment it ever gets, or the only rating it ever gets, is negative that really hurts the project and getting a single positive comment/rating a month later doesn't really do anything to help. But, it's hard to explain why that's upsetting to other people without it coming across as "I'm butthurt because of a single mean comment and a 1-star rating."
It also doesn't help that on a site like Itch there are developers that just give 1-stars on everything they can to hurt the competition, but that's another issue.