I'm going to 2nd the other guy - flooding the zone with shit is already something I see often in various lemmy communities. If you think commenters will read articles and actually present proof if something's wrong, you have a much higher expectation from the people here than they're actually capable of. People barely/never read the actual articles. They look at the title and the vote counts and comment/vote/think accordingly.
MBFC is at least an easy way to remove the obvious bad stuff. Yea, it's not perfect, but it's a thousand times better than expecting the community to self-moderate legitimate sources.
Doesn't look too much different. $13.5k median/year according to the that article.