This tends to be true with smaller accounts. Large account holders are much more aware of what is going on. It becomes about the culture. For instance, on EOS, top BPs are exchanges, and that community is fine with that. On Hive, the moment one exchange used customer funds to vote, all hell broke loose. The social connection, the "unaware" people, would be made quick to realize they are, in fact selling their votes to an attacker. PoS networks have consequences for lazy/unaware voting, if you vote for an attacker on the network, you run the risk of having your balance slashed. Combining social with the fact larger stakeholders are more aware of what is going on is a powerful force to neutralize someone looking solely for short term gains. Again, Hive locks you in a lot longer than you see anywhere else on layer 1's. So, there isn't much of a ref point when you say greedy, stupid whales not knowing what's going on, we don't have much evidence to point at in practice because short lock up vs. long lock ups are incomparable.
If you look at practice during the hostile takeover, Justing was openly bribing people to vote for him. None of our top 20 voted for him. So we can see that there was, infact, a large bribe attack which could have netted large stakeholders shorterm gains, but they passed because they know it would hurt their value long term.
With all this said, of course, we always need better ways to do skin in the game, nothing is perfect as we strive to counter our weakpoints and strengthen our strong points.