The answer to your titular question is no, but you are not really asking this question.
Tl;dr: Your complaint is based on a strawman. I reject it.
You first complained about this here.
In that entire thread, I removed a total of two comments (besides some I wrote myself). Both because they were obsolete, one by other comments by the same user, the other (yours) by an answer (your own).
So, this thread. Here I removed a greater number of comments -- again because they were obsolete.
The OP specifically requested (emphasis mine):
If you see any CSS/styling bugs, please start a new post and tag it with "design" and "bug".
It quickly became clear from a whole slew of comments that the title alignment was more widely disliked, so I created a new post. That made all comments about alignment obsolete -- both their content and their number/popularity, since the new thread was designed for voting. I removed those and some chat-style comments between the OP and myself in which we discussed how to proceed (also obsolete).
FWIW, I was complete transparent about that.
Nota bene: Before I took action, that question had amassed over 20 comments.
PS: All the comments I removed agreed with my own sentiment. Not that I cared, but the insinuation that I would use my mod powers to control opinion is insulting.
For reference, there is of course a network-wide policy for dealing with comments. It clearly states that obsolete comments should be removed (contrary to what Kaveh claims).
It remains open if I had to remove them as promptly as I did -- the policy uses phrases like "long ago" for their examples -- but the basic reasons for deletion were fulfilled. As a user, I would have flagged "obsolete"; I can not to that as a mod without deleting immediately, so that's what happened.
I stand by removing obsolete comments. It keeps comment threads -- even discussions -- readable. I do delete less aggressively on meta than on the main site, for exactly the reasons you mention. (In discussions, comments rarely become truly obsolete.)
So, in summary, I reject this complaint as invalid.
I may adjust my "pain threshold" in the future and withhold cleanups until the dust has settled (read: nobody will notice) in the future. However, I doubt I will ever see reason not to delete excessive chatting and/or huge numbers of obsolete comments, even if they are relatively new.
PS:
The fact that you (Kaveh) have no way to know exactly what comments got removed but your own (a small number, none of which were controversial in any way) makes this complaint even more shaky.
FWIW, some stats (the other mods can verify that I don't make these numbers up):
- I deleted a total twenty (20) comments on meta this year. 19 of them are discussed above. A sizable portion of them was my own.
Since the beginning of this site (almost four years ago), I deleted a total of 79 comments on meta. I have no (easy) way of knowing which and by whom, and I don't know if comments on deleted posts count.
I see that I dealt with 36 flags (some of which probably comment flags) and cleanups usually involve at about 50% my own comments, though.
- For reference, I have removed 204 comments on the main site this year (to my surprise, I'm this is the least number among all mods!), and 2.8k total.