First, I doubt that. Even with all the tooling available for mods on Reddit, being able to access a user’s overall karma or subreddit karma was really useful for moderating. Including the tools accessing that karma count.

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, even if that weren’t true, and future mod tooling for Lemmy was going to magically solve the problem, removing that tool now is pretty poor. Better to leave it and remove it only once it is no longer necessary.

Yes, it really was. It wasn’t perfect for the reasons you describe, but it certainly was a useful extra tool.

Karma was also a really handy tool for mods to keep away bots and trolls.