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‘Liking’ your content costs me nothing, so what’s to stop me from ‘Liking’ everything I see without considering how it affects the popularity of that content?

Is there evidence that a significant # of users are doing this?

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Even if it is a problem, it's a solvable one. One thing that I did, years ago, when trying to create an algorithm for what stuff you would find funny, was to entirely discard the input from the users with the top n% of favorites/likes.

Basically, we determined that some people were just less discerning than others.

There's probably better ways of doing this. Some people probably "Like" a bunch of things because they are less discerning, others do it because they are legitimate social leaders in their circles. So you may be able to do more if you have some way of knowing how many things someone sees and chooses not to like, or how many friends subsequently view based on a "Like" (which I suspect Facebook already considers when choosing what to show on timelines).

That's still gameable by spreading out the likes or votes over multiple accounts

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