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Are we reading the same comment? OP said

>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.

It's explicitly talking about "percentage" at the start. It would be weird if they silently switched to absolute numbers afterwards.

i read it as percentage applied to the first half, but not the second -- perhaps only on the grounds that to distribute the word "percentage" would make the claim obviously false.

Whether false by percentage or not, I'm not sure relative percentages are of that much importance. Surely the hundreds of thousands of american soliders dying in the US civil war wouldnt be relieved to hear that perhaps more black people were enslaved today, only to feel their sacrifce justified when hearing it was a mere 0.5%

The 13th amendment explicitly excludes prisoners. This shouldn't come as a surprise to any civil war soldier.

i think the post civil war era of America would be horrifying to many who died precisely to avoid it, their deaths rendered effectively pointless for at least a century

They are also wrong by absolute numbers.

Their choice of the word “percentage” is incongruent with meaning “absolute.”