There's really not a big difference in practice. If every post of mine gets hidden and downvoted, that's effectively the same as being shut down. The technicalities of it all are irrelevant in practice, even if that's not the case in theory.

At a minimum, you have recourse to appeal to other stakeholders. On YouTube you do not.

In addition, as others have told you, most of the other UIs do not hide content based on votes. That's about half of the usage. So in the worse case, if every post of yours got hidden (which hasn't happened; in fact one was, so this all seems rather drama queen, don't you think?), you would lose about half of your audience on Steem, not all of it.

But psychologically, there's a gigantic difference between not getting upvoted, and being actively downvoted

We know for a fact that the platform can not work without downvotes. So whatever negatives come with that, we'll have to live with, or come up with ways to mitigate. Perhaps you could make some constructive suggestions on the latter.

Personally, I have suggested many times that rewards not be shown in real time, only after payout, to help mitigate the perception of "losing" rewards. TPTB don't agree with me on that, I guess, since it hasn't happened.