There are two parts of the issue at hand:

1. By denying people the opportunity to voice and discuss their disagreements in a civil manner by means of deplatforming, targeted harassment (cancel culture) and other forms of witch hunting, it pushes them to participate in platforms and groups they otherwise would never associate with. Think prohibition act and what it did to the ABV of the drinks people were consuming;

2. Every crisis that doesn't outright kill a particular system or group of people either forces it to evolve or develop maladaptive mitigations. Regular social networks are a good example of the latter, becoming completely unusable and losing the very value they used to deliver. Eventually, this might encompass services like CloudFlare, the walled (or not so) gardens that Android and iOS are built upon, etc.

However, the incentives stay - it seems the amount of people who are simply unable to voice their mild opinion that does not conform to the blind and hypocritical fit of praise to shtick of the day is reaching critical mass.

Maybe we'll finally see the technology start moving back towards decentralization, which was the initial premise of the Internet, but now with very solid theory and research behind Tor, I2P and other networks/protocols yet to be invented. I don't mind that we all will be paying for hosting a little (more), as long as it kills the current adtech and puritan conformity-driven everything riddled with perverse incentives and absolute centralization of control.

The scary part is this whole thing right here is very much about preventing the last part of your post.. Or at the very least asserting dominion over what a newly re-decentralized net would permit. (i.e. a decentralized system forcing the same rules and standards as now) I mean look at how cries of "disinformation" and "hate" are treated already. Look at what the owner of KF was willing to do to keep the site up.. creating his own internet infrastructure. And look how this is turning out. people literally melting down because an infrastructure company won't leave the site open to criminal (DDoS) attacks. A few hundred people are all that it takes to create a shit storm that leads to enforcement of their standards on the rest of society.

And by doing so, they are proving the very value and necessity of free speech; they're unwittingly making their opponents' arguments for them.

This is what happens when all tech platforms are ideologically biased because of the employee base is almost all progressives.