But then how would you check if someone is a disingenuous troll, or a hypocrite, etc, it's the usual privacy vs open information trade off

A post made on a public forum is public information. I've used post history to figure out if someone was serious vs telling a joke that fell flat or for weird patterns.

Eh. If a webcrawer took a snapshot, they could just be indexed anyways. Its false sense of security.

Just like upvote/downvotes on Lemmy. Btw its all public lemvotes.org

So what? These are public comments. If you don't want your comments to haunt you for a prior bad take, maybe don't have bad takes or alternatively, explain them.

If you're saying you put personal information there, one layer of obfuscation wouldn't stop someone motivated from finding information. This only stops people using profiles as intended.