My instance while it has the ability to see scores I keep them turned off, I find the score system as a whole to be counterproductive to a healthy environment as it encourages an echo chamber effect. an effect that by making every vote public to the standard person will just become worse as now the people who were voicing their opinion via the downvote/upvote system, will think twice about voicing in the first place. It also removes the people who are non-combative/confrontational from giving an opinion as it links a name to the score. There's tons of people that would like to give their opinion about things, but don't want it to be able to be looked up easily, and don't want to be confronted about that opinion.

If conversations were healthy and always on topic I would fully agree with a public info voting system, but, there is no system in place to prevent someone from getting super pissed off that you downvoted their comment that's about how they love the color red when the conversation at hand is to do with the financial stability of McDonald's so they decide to just Branch out and nuclear downvote every other comment you have, or decide to try to harass you in your other comments. Yes you can block them and you can get the instance team involved but that can only go so far especially if the problamic user is part of a different instance, and like you said moderation is already strained so there's no point in giving even more work to them

The better solution in my opinion, is just keep the barrier in place, and honestly if it had the ability to I would say restrict down what the API provides regarding scores even further, but I'm fairly certain that the way it is due to the need of being able to Federate.