I hate a lot of the things that reddit has been doing but I still think not all of them are on purpose. I ran into this issue myself before it was widely discussed and my first thought was that it had simply failed to delete some comments or deleted only from some cache.
So far every exampe I’ve seen of this can still be explained by bad engineering and I see no reason to think it is “undeleting” stuff by design, since it seems to happen to very random content that has no general value (like restoring 20 random comments out of 900 that were deleted).
I’m still using sublime to this day. It keeps getting worse and falling behind VSCode with every new feature that never comes gets to it, but I have so many pet peeves with VSCode that everytime I try it I soon give up. I wish there were more options these days, but as the expected feature sets get more complex the number of options keep going down.