"So you can do away with the clickbait-y, karma or like farming..."
Are there many individual users who participate in these type of activities?
My understanding is that a lot of it is automated: farming with the intent to make accounts look legitimate and eventually manipulate public opinion to whatever ends (like selling a product/service).
Is kbin doing anything different that would curb or dissuade such behavior?
On that note, upvotes and downvotes upvote matter even less here ("here" meaning kbin) as the factor dictating comment order in the "hot" ranking is boosting (think retweet equivalent), not the vote count.
As far as kbin is concerned, it will appear under the "boosted" category. Some platforms handle this differently. To take a random user as an example, this fosstodon user has a bunch of posts which will show up separately from their boosts when viewed from kbin. But looking at their profile from Fosstodon itself, you will see posts and boosts mixed together as is the norm on Mastodon.
That's the federated aspect of those platforms at work. Assuming both instances of a given platform on the Fediverse (here, Fosstodon and kbin.social) are federated together, which they are by default, content from both will be accessible from users of the instances.
Eh, I don't see that changing here. There's no explicit profit motive on Reddit either (at least, not in terms of the Reddit account), but it still happens. Companies are incentivized to have titles that get clicks, and users just like seeing the number go up. It's just what happens.