If there is one thing I have learned from lemmy so far, is there are a lot of weirdos on here with an axe to grind. world and ml get regularly DDOSed, there was the time when world got hacked and got a ton of horrible stuff posted to it, and there was that one user who claimed a lot of communities and sat on them, only to vow revenge when they got banned.
My guess is that Lemmy is at the weird intersection where it's popular enough that people get satisfaction from "breaking" it while also not being mature enough to have robust ways to defend against it. The project did get forced into the limelight after all and it's fantastic that everything has scaled as well as it has so far
Idk but that same type of spammer keeps doing to Hexbear, too. Using the purge feature is good for that spammer type so users don't end up with a ton of notifications of deleted comments afterwards
The reason we just upgraded to 0.18.4 from 0.18.2 is because that is the exact feature that was broken in 0.18.2 and it was kind of essential in this case
They're likely very upset about something. Seems like a supreme waste of effort though. Admins can just click on a user and purge all comments with a single click. The best part is how they put a pacifier on the picture. It's like subconsciously they know they're just having a big ol cry.