Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the disavow tool was not created for negative SEO. He said "Not to put more fuel on the fire, but negative SEO is not a reason we have this tool -- and I honestly can't recall a situation where a site ever needed to do a disavow for that."
The disavow link tool launched in 2012 and if you read the original Google blog post of the launch you will see Google even said there, this tool was not designed specifically for negative SEO. Google said it is designed to "to help clean up if you've hired a bad SEO or made mistakes in your own link-building." Google said they have algorithms that are designed to not be impacted by negative SEO. Google said:
In general, Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking. However, if you're worried that some backlinks might be affecting your site's reputation, you can use the Disavow Links tool to indicate to Google that those links should be ignored. Again, we build our algorithms with an eye to preventing negative SEO, so the vast majority of webmasters don't need to worry about negative SEO at all.
So back then, they said this also.
Here is John's tweet:
Not to put more fuel on the fire, but negative SEO is not a reason we have this tool -- and I honestly can't recall a situation where a site ever needed to do a disavow for that. I'm sure there are a handful of cases, but for the most part, it's totally unnecessary time spent.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) May 12, 2020
But Google over the years did say if you feel threatened by negative SEO you can use the disavow tool. But in general, Google has said just ignore negative SEO.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
