This makes me thing you don’t understand my meaning. I think you’re talking about one day reddit decides to search for an restore obfuscated and deleted comments.

Yes, that is what we’re talking about. There were a large amount of users that updated their comments to something basic and then deleted those comments. I’m fairly confident that before they happened they had zero need to implement a spam prevention system like you’re suggesting. The fact that all those users’ (including myself) comments are still <deleted> is evidence of that.

They may have implemented someone like that recently, but not before.