There aren't competing definitions of censorship. There are authoritative lexicons that have provided the definition for centuries. Censorship is the suppression of speech.
Simple.
Censorship is necessary to Hive, because it is the mechanism by which spam, scams, and plagiarism are prevented. That's why the front ends put up a click wall when reputation drops to zero, because that hides the spam, scams, and plagiarism.
Opinion flagging abuses these mechanisms that protect Hive and is harmful. Oligarchs that abuse these mechanisms do profit from it, because oligarchs extract the majority of rewards from the pool. Most of the rewards they deny the censored end up in their wallets. This has dramatically prevented Hive from growing, and this has caused outside interest in the platform to wane, which protects the big fish in our little pond from the vastly bigger fish that would swallow it up, as Steem proved.
I agree with your conclusion, but note the dinosaurs own the only means for crypto to transact. If your wallet is a key that unlocks your crypto, the internet is the keyhole it must navigate through to do so. We need independent means of communication if we are going to be able to transact freely and the legacy financial system does not want us to, because they can deny us the use of their wholly owned internet to transact on.
Thanks!