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The mod banning these users is the same mod who made the posts they downvoted. This is mod abuse, turning the downvote button into an auto-self-ban button.
The message is "If you disagree with me, you will be banned"
Monitoring and banning users for using lemmy as intended to signal boost your opinion should be grounds to have all mod privileges removed. This behaviour undermines the integrity of the server and the wider fediverse.
It used to be that votes were meant to be used as an indicator of the quality of the post according to the community guidelines, not how "agreeable" a comment or post is. This cultural change is one the most toxic behaviors that made Reddit such a crappy place for discussion.
This was already bad on Reddit, but at least there one could avoid this problem because people were used to browse only the subreddits they subscribed to, so niche subreddits could still have some semblance of "good" community participation. On Lemmy, most people browse by /all and lots of them still treat the downvote button as a some mechanism to train an algorithm. These users are the worst.
In the beginning, I was actually sending DMs to people asking them to please not downvote something if they were not part of the community and their reaction was basically "I don't want to see this, so I will downvote to bury it" (completely ignoring the fact that they could simply hide the post or stop browsing by /all).
So, while "banning everyone who downvotes the post" might seem an overreaction, I could definitely see a moderator could flag a vote as coming from a non-community member and use that flag to ignore their votes in the ranking systems, and I would love to have a bot that auto-messages every clueless downvoter explaining the proper netiquette around votes for non-community members.
If your posts turn up in /c/all they're going to get treated accordingly.
And this is fine. /c/all should let users downvote posts they don't like so popular stuff can rise to the top. That's what makes /c/all sometimes worth looking at.
Otherwise, it'll just fill up with all sorts of crap from communities with no downvoting rules, including edgy borderline racist stuff that's not quite bad enough to get banned, or just shitty positivity memes copied from somewhere else.
Your problem is that you can't delist your community from /c/all. That sucks, but right now your posts are turning up in two different communities with different expectations and you just need to deal with that.
I may be wrong, but admins will be able to configure what communities should be visible in the public view. So your instance would not show on their frontpage things that are not representative of the instance
For users themselves who are browsing by /all and feel justified in downvoting because they don't like what they see, it's a different story. If a community is (in their view) problematic, they can simply block it. Downvoting has no place in their curation.