Is this not a false dichotomy? Unless you are purposely using deprioritization as a substitute for blacklisting it would stand to reason that results 'moderated' to the bottom of the a priority list ended up there because they actually aren't considered useful/relevant to the query. So unless you are moderating in bad faith blacklisting is clearly different because it removes the users ability to find the content at all and it wholly ignores the intent of their search.

There's barely a difference between delisting and listing as the eleventh result...

You honestly think that it's the wrong answer to show that website when somebody searches for that term?

The title tag of the site is as follows: "Download music, movies, games, software! The Pirate Bay - The galaxy's most resilient BitTorrent site"

And it's the number one search result for that phrase on DDG. Because search engines are actually programmed well enough to figure out that's the right answer. I'm not sure why you think it's the wrong answer to show that site as the first result, but I'm pretty sure everybody else in the world disagrees with you, and would prefer that they see the website they are searching for, instead of news articles about the site they are searching for.

We should apply this logic to something else to have some fun. You go to the shop and look for spaghetti and instead of finding it, you find all the other things you can use together with spaghetti to make a nice meal.

Now, if only you could find some spaghetti to go with all the other stuff...

This is 2021. Search engines are aiming for semantic matches.