Staying decent in a cutthroat place isn’t naive. It’s the hardest mode on the menu.

Being decent somewhere nobody else is gets read as naivety, usually by people who gave up on it first. It is the harder route, since you are declining tools everyone around you is using and paying for that in results. Nothing about it is soft. Holding a line under real pressure to drop it takes considerably more than following the room.

When the environment pushes, choose the one standard you will not trade and defend that one specifically. Accept that it will cost you something concrete. Find one other person who works the same way and stay near them.