however, enough of the protest votes would have swung the election in her favor.

I have never seen a single piece of data to back up a claim like that. If you have, I'd love to see it

they didn't all protest the vote. I would say most of them just didn't vote because they couldn't be bothered.

I would guess this is true, but this is a failure of the candidate, not the electorate. In a country without mandatory voting or a national holiday for elections, motivating your base is extremely important, especially when you base is working class people who are less likely to be able to take time off to vote. Even ignoring her centrist economic platform and genocide support, her strategy was explicitly to target disaffected Republicans instead of energizing her own base, and that strategy failed. Kamala and the incompetent consultants she surrounded herself with own this loss, and whining about the voters won't change that.