I like this quote because it encourages a realistic understanding of abuse prevention, that you cannot and should not expect it to be total. This is not a highly moderated social media with professional moderators, no chain of command.
But I will point out again to you that self voting has only very recently become so good, and voting for others less appealing. This quotation amounts to cherry picking because you side step the stated goal of the network. Let me help by adding some context for the other people who have not read the whitepaper:
The naive voting process creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.
Self voting is rampant and a large problem. Another poster once said to me that arguing about what constitutes "rampant" abuse is the argument of the beard (I think it was @baah ). I think he had a point and I won't argue too much with it. But it is a problem, it is being discussed like crazy and it does require a solution. Paying ourselves is not the goal here.