> Suddenly another, even higher ranking person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism.

I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had.

In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.