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Moderation is a complex issue.

Power Mods
One problem which Aether has attempted to solve is "Power Mods", people who grab and then abuse power over a community. Aether has provided for that possibility with a system whereby communities (subverses, as they are called on Voat) can impeach and vote out the moderator, if they don't agree with their actions. All moderation actions are open to view by the community. Impeachment like this doesn't work as intended when the communities are small, so hasn't fully been implemented, yet.

Curation
When Voat came to Aether, there were the usual calls to introduce censorship and banning. I don't think anybody was banned in the end. All the accounts who wanted bans were visible though. Equally, when so-called 'Progressives' came to Aether after a purge at Reddit, they were ignored too. Things sorted themselves out quite well.

Pr0n
Voat has eluded this problem by being text-only. By default, you don't see thumbnails, though this can be changed in the settings. Aether doesn't host images, so there aren't any issues to worry about like that.

Junk*
Low quality content disappears after 6 months without interaction. Spam and poor content don't remain visible when they go stale.

Aether has worked well with low - no moderation because in Aether's case it hasn't been necessary. I agree with you though that curation of content is important and may become needed in future. The best way to approach it, I think, is to conceptualize it as deliberate attacks by spammers, who receive a financial reimbursement and who are equipped with bots. The Whitepaper for Plebbit has had some discussion relating to this. The proposed approach is to use (self-devised) CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests) and community activism. Aether's approach is to make spam costly by requiring a computational task for every interaction, which could be defeated by incentivizing the bots.

If you see a platform as doomed due to its inherent flaws and vulnerabilities, you don't want to put in the downvoting labour required to delay its inevitable destruction. One problem is the mentality of the users, who want only to enjoy content provided by others and not to do any moderation or pave the way for others on a better engineered platform.

Plebbit does look promising. https://github.com/plebbit/whitepaper/discussions/2
https://gab.com has really taken off lately too, it is like Voat now in many ways.

On Aether at the moment low moderation is the norm as there is currently little need for moderation. As the number of Aether users keeps growing, the moderation system there will come into its own.

Anything cool on Gemini a person could look for?