There never was any code to prevent abuse. You are supposed to report the offending players if they abuse vote kick. And yes something should happen. The GMs take that stuff very seriously.
I think this is more of a problem with JP servers in general rather than legacy servers. We don't have this issue on sarg which is probably because its an NA server.
As you no doubt read, not everybody is willing to fork out more than a full month's subscription fee for something like a server transfer.