I fully understand your anxiety on the matter, and this is a critique I have actually had directly with the software. I did get into it a bit with db0 (sorry man!) over it, and thankfully my critiques were listened to and the reasoning behind the software itselfs overall use was clarified.

The goal isn’t a glorified whitelist, but rather a crowdsourced tool that people can use what they want with it. You can automate the blocks if you want, you can make it so that there’s warnings when blocks are made, you can impliment a whitelist if you want, it’s really on people who use it. The only somewhat automated aspect of it that’s by default is the identification of instances with spam like behavior, and there is steps to rectify that if they are identified as such so it’s not like a permanent mark of shame.

I participate in these conversations of fediseers tooling and development with single user/small instances in mind, so know that as tools are being made I am making sure others are mindful of how it may affect small single user instances/new niche communities. I will continue entering those conversations with those communities in mind as well. I gotchu.