Bro, the lowest an admiral ever downplayed was saying they're comparable to YC1s—that stopped being a thing for the most part after GreenBull. Tejas is probably the only guy that reiterates this. Almost no one else believes this shit. Despite saying WB two shotted Akainu, no one believes he's anything below a solid top-tier. The worst Akainu slander was him getting two shotted by WB or Garp beat Akainu.
Admiral hate in general has less scope to spread than Mihawk because a lot of prominent characters including Zoro is likely to get a potential admiral match up in the future: Luffy, Law, Kid, Zoro, Sanji, Sabo, etc, all these fandoms expect their characters to fight an admiral, so most of them shy away from bashing the admiral. And majority of the Yonko supporters are from these fandoms outside the direct Yonko fans, who're actually a minority.
Mihawk, on the other hand, is reserved for Zoro, so no one loses anything for downplaying him. We know for a fact that Zoro has more haters than fans, and all of them collectively target Mihawk to indirectly shit on Zori. Even the worst of admiral haters like Ndule, Erkan, SkySanji, etc, rank Kuzan and Akainu higher than MIhawk to say the least.