I'm about to get banned aren't I...

Not unless you do something more offensive than that. We usually reserve bans for posters that have repeatedly violated our rules or posted something racist, denying the Holocaust, etc. This doesn't fall under those categories. If it did, we normally issue a warning first.

As to your question...AskHistorians is an evolving community. Old mods step down, new mods step up; flairs cease activity and new ones come in. Proposals are made for changes to the rules, and new rules are recommended based on what we see as the behavior in the subreddit. A lot of our responses - how we handle certain questions, comments, and behaviors - have developed over time, after a lot of back-and-forth and consideration by the mods as a body.

So no, AskHistorians today is not quite the same as it was a couple years ago, and it is very different from when the subreddit was first created. There are more mods, more mod tools, rules and responses have been refined, and more mods talk to each other, both before taking action and after action has been taken.

Most of the replies to questions are not removed - although it is easy to get that impression. Very popular questions tend to attract more attention, and fast upvotes mean other subreddits may get notified and jump in. That usually means a spate of poor-quality comments, mostly from users who are unfamiliar with how we do thing on AskHistorians. That means mods also tend to watch those threads more often, and work to prune them quickly so that we don't have to remove entire comment chains of wikipedia links or anecdotes. Unfortunately, those comments still count on the reddit total, so folks expecting to see a lively debate-thread often come into a ghost thread... such is life.

We would rather have a few, high-quality answers that meet our guidelines, with solid sources and thorough knowledge of the material that actually addresses the question, than a hundred poor comments.