Sorry, I'm kind of unsure I an following the scenario you are describing here - are you expecting the edgelord hero to have the goodwill to hide the comment so his followers won't harass? Or, are you saying that the person potentially being harassed can hide comments to avoid being harassed (not clear this would even work?)
All of these measures, however they are expected to work, can also be done with blocking.
The person being harassed hiding the edgelord comment would also hide their post from the edgelord followers, making them harder to find. That's the feature I think is extremely usefull. The rest, meh.
But all it takes is the edgelord or one of his followers screenshotting the comment and retweeting it before it’s hidden and this is effectively nullified. Their followers know the username, what’s actually being stopped here? this type of thing does nothing but hide information and empower trolls.
The plus side is that it empowers content creators to control the conversation, which I truly believe is a good thing, however in practice I find it completely abused especially at scale by bad actors. I do truly hope they reverse course on this decision.
People who would do this are a minority (I hope): that would be active harassment, and my experience is that in most cases, the community doing the harassing doesn't really means to, it's an outrage side effect.
No message are deleted, its basically just removing the link in between two posts to limit heat in the discourse.
For me, Twitter/mastodon/BlueSky are not really discussion boards and more announcement places, so removal of causal links do not disturb me, but I guess for you it seems more discussion oriented, which I did not understand in my first message.
All of these measures, however they are expected to work, can also be done with blocking.