I have started reading HN via this page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
because it shows flagged posts. It's not just comments. More or less any story that might attract comments of a conservative bent are immediately flagged, like the recent story about how Twitter is shadowbanning prominent conservatives.
I might go looking for an extension or CSS change to disable the greying out of downvoted comments too. The greying achieves nothing. There's virtually no real spam or abuse on this site, so a grey comment almost invariably means someone made a good point that someone else couldn't refute and didn't want to. They're often excellent posts.
Don't expect it to change. The moderators here like to claim they're unbiased but I've seen very frequent cases where they tick off someone and warn them they'll be banned simply for not agreeing with whatever extremist ideas are coming into vogue in California - but the posts were written politely and made good/logical points. Meanwhile people supporting the opposite position with comments that throw around terms like "nazi", "racist", "trash fire" or whatever are left alone. And of course the blatant flagging of posts or comments simply for their viewpoint is left unaddressed.