Thanks. From the linked discussion, it does solve a legitimate problem - I had noticed that entire comment branches could be lost if a parent comment was deleted or removed. That was also pretty bad, so I'm glad there's been progress there.

Honestly I think reddit's approach is correct: when I delete my comment, other see that a comment existed here once, but not what it said or who wrote it, and it's no longer interactive. And, deleting it doesn't affect child comments.

Fair, I was hoping it'd be something you could configure. Hopefully this improves with Lemmy in the future then.

Lol, seems we can also vote on and reply to comments after they've been deleted. That seems silly