It's absolutely been worse here lately. I don't know that I'd call it worse than reddit, but Lemmy is definitely trending more toxic. I'm certainly not a heavy user by any means. Idk if the more reasonable voices have just become less active or if more toxic voices have arrived or what, but where as 6+ months ago things tended to be more discussion prone than antagonistic, it's now mostly antagonistic, especially in the more popular communities.
I will say, I've left many of the lemmy.ml communities in favor of similar communities on other servers and that's helped as far as making my feed of posts less toxic to boot (and less spammy).
I haven't done much of my own moderation in blocking so I'm running mostly based on the server moderation.
It can handle normal paper sheets too