You can now just outright hide your profile/history even without NSFW content. Its a really good feature for everyone involved.

Comment and post history is still trivial to find through a basic google query.

All that hiding them on Reddit does is pissing other users off because it breaks establish site's norms and expectations.

True, the only option is to not use the site entirely.

the problem here is that in an inversion of the usual roles, Google has locked us into reddit's ecosystem by placing it highly in search results, killing off all the dedicated forums, meaning that some answers to some questions are only available there, simply by user quantity. I literally have reddit IP-blocked on my laptop using my hosts file and I still have to copy a reddit link into TOR once or twice a day to get at some useful information

It’s not a bad thing. People on there, if you piss them off in a discussion, will go find your old posts and downvote them and in some rare cases harass you by replying or worse put two and two together to doxx you.

Not sure what you mean. They can still do all that even if the profile is set to private. It doesn't hide your posts and comments from Google. They are hoovered up just the same.

It’s slightly harder is what I mean. Takes more effort than clicking on profile and going thru comments

I see you've never accidentally really pissed someone off in a comments section about an inane topic.

I got e-mail blasted on my linked e-mail here for a user called u/Loughla on reddit (who has deleted their account now). It's not me. It was never me. But oooohhhh boy did they upset somebody in an anime subreddit.

In other words, angry people absolutely will go the extra mile just for some feeling of vindication or other nonsense.

Eh, for investigating scammers/bots it's a real pain in the ass.

Massive changes in posting history was a very good sign that an account was a farmed or stolen account.

Makes it a lot easier for reddit to deny their bot problem.