Nothing in the linked thread says anything about an admin changing that feature and soon realizing how repetitive the site became.
It’s in the next thread I linked in that post here .
In that original topic, I was told about a site-wide setting where those reply icons are displayed even when the reply is to the post immediately above. We enabled that on our install and personally I’ve had a mixed experience with it. While it did “fix” my original problem, I now find myself clicking the reply icon to see the previous post, just to see that it was actually the post right above. In short, I understand why the Discourse defaults are the defaults, as they do seem better than the current alternative.
As long as people know that, there are multiple ways to make the communication clearer, many of which are discussed the thread where this discussion originated here