I have a 15+ year old account that has a hidden history because far too many times someone dug through my comments, took something out of context, and pivoted to that instead of the actual conversation.
My take is that people should respond to the comment not the commenter.
It doesn't help that afaik there are no search engines which allow you to search by links (aka the now-broken "links:" operator on google), which would allow you to search "links:reddit.com/user/xxxxx site:reddit.com" and find all comments by that user, since the username portion of their comment would have a profile link
They're all archived and searchable off-site too. Even deleted and removed comments.