I'm old and I've been using command lines for a long time. Especially in Linux. Heck I've used a terminal based web browser! (Links or Lynx? I can't remember the name.)
I understand your frustration and I, too, thought that blocking went both ways before seeing your post.
If you encounter someone who is harassing you and attacking your reputation without your knowledge and down voting your whole history, you should gather the proof and contact your instances mods. There's a very good chance they'll ban them either temporarily or permanently from the instance. Or contact the mods from their instance as well.
You get a lot of the same tools as Mint, such as Flatpak instead of Snap but with no Flatpak packages pre-installed. On top of this, it also pre-installs WINE 9, Google Chrome instead of Firefox, and quite a few smaller quality-of-life tools such as the Transmission BitTorrent client, a download manager, an image viewer, and more.
It's essentially an object oriented shell. It's actually pretty good. But yeah, error outputs are a pain to read.