Yes, the link behaves as expected - however, we should do better than just render an anchor (tbh, I do not see any issue with rendering a proper link that 404s for users without access), agreed.

I don't yet have a preference between a link that 404s for users without access and omitting the link for such users. I'm hoping there will be some discussion that might uncover some advantages and disadvantages.

The only thing that comes to mind is that the link contains a unique id, so even if it 404s, would that still allow someone to identify which comments were made by the same deleted user? Even if so, would that be a problem? I don't know if there's a reason to avoid that.

Oh yeah, good thought - technically, it will be possible as long as the comments / posts are up, yes, that's a lapse in judgment on my part. We can easily make them non-links, yeah, there's a dedicated helper for that, after all

The only thing that comes to mind is that the link contains a unique id, so even if it 404s, would that still allow someone to identify which comments were made by the same deleted user?

trichoplax‭ and Oleg Valter‭, I don't consider that to be undesirable. If anyone has already interacted with that user, they'll retain its user identifier regardless, in their browser's history.

Additionally, when a user account is deleted, I doubt that anyone expects that correlating that user account to its actions would be removed. Rather, merely the personal account data would be removed.