And I’ve already had this happen a few times. The search engine I use (Kagi) tends to rank fediverse platforms higher when they have a good answer, though it’s rare they ever have something relevant.
But I’ve gone to multiple posts on lemmy where the content was straight up gone, or where the main post was available, but the comment(s) that provided an actual answer were deleted.
I will say, you’ll see a lot of users on lemm.ee who deleted their content, because lemm.ee shut down, and there’s no way to retroactively delete your content after the fact once the instance is no longer being hosted, so I know a lot of people didn’t want to leave any kind of permanent digital trail of their account data and just deleted the whole thing.
Hell, even I did with my lemm.ee account before it was shut down, but I hadn’t really answered many questions there that would be useful to most people. It was a lot more political debate than helpful commentary.
And the person who made that article even included a photo of an Apple sticker on their own car!