First real use case I can think of here is doxxing.

Maybe people just should not post things they would regret about, or at least do it anonymously, or at least use fake phone number. Sadly our govt doesn't want us to use fake phone numbers.

I would have assumed that this wouldn't require a tool. That you could just click on a user and get this information, just like you can for Hacker News, Reddit, and myriad other social media sites (not to mention old-school forums). Apparently you can't, but I wouldn't have found it remotely surprising if you could. They're all public comments that are tied to the username, right?

Am I missing something here? I honestly find it strange that you consider this such a mind-blowing privacy breach that should require state-level resources to accomplish.

I was able to retrieve my comment history, and while it’s not perfectly complete, it hits a pretty huge chunk of an old Google Takeout I did.

lolarchiver is also a known platform with a reasonable and pretty long online presence.