In other words their response was “hey dumbass here’s what happened, now move along”. They didn’t do anything except school you.

Ah, I get where you’re going with that and understand your view. My point was more for users who think that deleting an account will really get rid of it everywhere and I didn’t want them getting their hopes up.

Not quite. If your comments federated out to an instance that either a) doesn’t get the delete request or b) ignores the delete request, your comments will very much stay out there in the fedeverse with not much you can do. Yes posts on the original instance may be gone, but anything that get pushed out via ActivityPub is a crap shoot.