I don't think the first phrases are submissive - polite, but not submissive.

@toby544 makes a good point: in your examples I don't read any submissiveness either. Reviewers are volunteers who spent their time on your work, so it is only right and polite to thank them for that, even if you disagree with their review. Now if we remove submissive from your question it becomes: should I be polite or impolite during the rebuttal. The answer to that question should be self-evident...

I've added a submissive phrase that I read often. Please note that the question does not reduce to polite vs. impolite. For example, suppose a reviewer makes a comment that they find the results unconvincing. Such a statement is typically not or only weakly contested in a typical rebuttal, whereas an aggressive one might directly attack the reviewers judgement.

"We will tone down that claim as you suggested" = submissive? I don't think so. It is very common for (especially new) authors to get carried away, and make claims that are too strong to be supported by the evidence presented in the article. In that case there are two possible solutions: either get more evidence or tone down the claim. The latter is usually the easiest and quickest solution, and apparently the reviewer suggested that solution and the authors agreed. Sounds very pragmatic and constructive to me.

"The papers you suggest us to cite are not related to our work, which raises the suspicion that you are trying to unethically promote your own papers." Less is more. What exactly are you hoping to achieve by explicitly accusing the referee of "unethically promoting their own papers"? If they are, surely the editor is able to form the same suspicion on the basis of the first part of this sentence. In case you are right, you are not adding any information that the editor is not aware of. And in case you are wrong, you will look silly.

If you need to be offensive, why be so articulate, just tell them they are unloved sons/daughters of their mother. " your reviewer confidence score." wtf?

My answer is "No, I haven't seen this be successful:" but I have a story: One of my bosses was a very successful writer of journal articles, with hundreds and hundreds of published articles. When I first got hired at that place, I was a noob, still finishing my PhD. Sam told me "when you get reviews on a paper, read them. Then put them away for at least a day to calm down".

These rebuttals aren’t just aggressive, they are dismissive at best and personal attacks at worst. They aren’t responses, they are the politely phrased equivalent of "NO U!!!“.

@MisterMiyagi It is clear that these responses are not "nice". My question was whether anyone has seen such a strategy being successful

@mto_19 I feel this question is based on a false dichotomy: you can be polite and still strongly present your own case. You don't have to be impolite to stand up for yourself. A soft spoken strong argument usually carries much more weight with an editor than a loud personal attack.

@mto_19 nobody has seen such a strategy work anywhere in live, not just academia. Being impolite, aggressive and attacking a person does not work unless you have the power to ignore that person anyways. It's not a valid strategy.

@mto_19 I have seen direct, blunt, even borderline offensive rebuttals work. But they were also highly factual. Not once have I seen a successful rebuttal that counters an unsupported claim with an unsupported claim of their own.

@MaartenBuis I encourage you to look at the comments you have made on this post. Would you say they're impolite? (I assume not.) Now, would they be the way you'd phrase things as an author responding to a reviewer? I'm guessing not. You'd do something to them to make them more "palatable". -- So it's not a dichotomy. There's a certain something in a response-to-reviewers which makes it different from other polite replies. That's what the question is asking about, whether you call it "submissive", "soft spoken", "deferential", "obsequious", "extra polite" or whatever.

This is a valid question. Its clear that the OP didn't know the answer to the question at the time it was asked as it was asked imperfectly. A lot of comments that are overly critical of the specific examples used by the OP fail to recognize what the OP is asking or missed the assignment themselves. Another way to phrase this question would be "How do you assertively refute a review that is incompetent and/or in bad faith?" There OP is looking for a way to professionally, not politely, refute a review without accepting any of the comments or critiques from the review.

@MaartenBuis It is indeed a false dichotomy, but failing to understand that fact is extremely common.

@DavidS no, I think you are wrong and did not understand the question correctly.

@DonQuiKong Re-reading everything, I may have. Its unclear what the OP is asking specifically. It could be the simple yes/no "is attacking the reviewer a valid strategy" that you answered. I had thought it was more complicated, where the OP's worldview is one without a true "peer" and everything is either submissive or dominant and they are seeking a response that doesn't contain "submissive" elements that is also not polite, but would still be acceptable/successful. Though, I'm leaning you may be right and I was overthinking it.

@DavidS imho op just wants to know whether telling someone that they are behaving like an ass will suddenly make them realize that they are. The answer is usually: no, not a chance. (Independent of whether the person is an ass or not).

Those are not aggressive rebuttals - those are childish overreactions.