It said "about time."

I think the point was that the user's comments didn't add much value to the site. If you don't have anything of value to say, then don't say it. Reddit is probably a better platform if you just want to say "nice", or something.

Note the phrase "a huge number" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26558343.

The banned user is a person who intentionally trolls comment sections, chats, and other forms of feedback. It's genuinely their goal to get banned.

In isolation, maybe it doesn’t, but reading through the comment history, the site will be better without these contributions.

Have any data to back that up?

FWIW this person is also banned from the Svelte github and the Svelte discord for similar behaviour.

You can enable display of dead/flagged comments in the settings.

Haha thank you kind stranger! I've been a member since 2012 and while I've visited my profile tons of times, for checking comments and submissions, I've apparently never stopped to look at the settings and what they might do. I have a userscript that makes the main view 69ch wide and blurs my username, but I've never even been aware that the site actually has its own customization settings. :facepalm:

With pleasure.

FYI: [dead] means the account is (shadow)banned, while [flagged] just refers to the particular comment.