Right, agreed, thanks.

If it helps, I would like if a community moderator had both options (for either a post or a comment) - to scrub entirely (for e.g. CSAM) or to just remove the link from the community along with OP's content but leaving the responses that it spawned beneath it intact (and if possible, still viable). As a mod of a medium-to-small community on Reddit, I often had to remove posts yet still continued to discuss things with the OP, like the reason why I felt that I had to do it, and/or others could likewise continue the discussions that they had already started.

i.e., it would be good if content could be "owned" by the person who wrote it, subject to mod & admin approvals for how it may "fit in" at the community and instance levels. e.g., a reply is "content" that should not as readily disappear just because the OP was, or had to be, removed.

So that also overlaps into a second thing, the distinction between removing vs. locking - especially since we have no modmail here, and all the more so for communities that just say that the content was removed by a "mod". e.g. someone posting and then going to bed or work could check in later to find their content removed, and as things now stand better than previously, at least get a sense of why it might have been (as opposed to simply a "not found" message on a white background screen OH MY EYES WHILE IN DARK MODE AAAAGGHH!!).

I have found posts from myself on reddit after having deleted all my reddit stuff multiple times. as far as I can tell it just hides it from the logged in user.