Cancel culture is when people are actually canceled: when accounts are shut down, people are fired, bank accounts closed, people are blacklisted. Actual material damages. Trivialization does not serve your point.
Even if everything being asserted against them is true, the penalties rarely seem fitting for a civilized society.
Indeed, that's the consensus that we arrived at after the Hollywood red scare. But each generation believes their crises are exponentially worse than anything previously witnessed, excusing extreme measures.