It's seemed p inevitable when I first joined. I'm also not convinced about the party line of z@ps being somehow necessarily superior to likes or a better 'signal' of quality of post. Visit primal's trending tab and you can see this. Social media dynamics on nostr seem to work exactly like all other social media, we just also have alt-likes with some sort of monetary value or something. But yes, z@ps do seem to bring the potential with it of another additional sort of social media game meta.
One of the most sensible things Instagram did (mostly by force of criticism and bad press) was give the options for users to hide like counts under their posts/notifications. I'm not sure any nostr client has this option? #asknostr