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Thank you for raising this question.  We've been a little vague in our plans for comments, aside from (irony alert) comment threads in some Figma wireframes that aren't the most visible.

Speaking for myself and not for the team: 

I use TopAnswers too, and the sidebar chat works ok on a desktop computer with a larger viewport, but the experience on a phone or even a tablet is kind of limited.  Even on my desktop, with the bit of font zoom that my eyes require, it makes for some pretty short, choppy lines in messages.  Just as text that is too *wide* is hard to read, so is text that is too *narrow*.  When we make layout choices we have to consider the many configurations our users might bring to our site.  As you said, TopAnswers makes it a toggle on a phone; view chat *or* the question/question list.  Whatever we do for comments (or eventually chat), it'll need to work for both small and large windows.

Part of the idea behind threaded comments -- just one level of threading, not the mess you get on some sites that indent each level and then you're 20 levels deep and it's hard to read -- is that there will be a place for the mix of feedback, back-and-forth debugging/clarifications, and tangents that sometimes happen.  And this place will be *there, but not invasive* -- usually collapsed, and you can decide which threads to expand.  On SE some communities shut down all comments that aren't immediately about the post they're attached to, while other communities are more liberal.  We're not making a decree about this; we want to handle the latter gracefully, because it's going to happen sometimes.

We do need a place for casual chat; for all that I find most chat *interfaces* frustrating in some way or other, I've found that *having* chat is an important tool for community-building.  The people who work together to build our communities need to be able to interact with and get to know each other.  Sometimes that'll be general chat, maybe not even about the site's topic, and sometimes it'll be about specific posts.

I have been envisioning (Art will shoot me now :-) ) a "chat" pseudo-category, alongside Q&A and a site's blog and contests and whatever else.  Behind there would be not the kinds of posts you see on the rest of the site but, rather, something more free-form.  There could be different rooms or channels.  And, if we did something like that, then anybody (with some privilege TBD) could also create a chat channel/room/whatever for a specific question or article, with linking between the two.

But chat is a large project, and strictly speaking we don't need integrated chat immediately because we do have the Discord server.  Using the Discord server has all of the same problems of a *different thing, over there* that SE chat has -- different login, different interface, weak connections... But we have it, and we don't yet have threaded comments and new privileges and several other things we know are critical, and chat is a large project (can we integrate something instead?), so a chat system will have to wait.

Which brings us back to comments.  I'm hoping that threading will help make them usable without adding to the scrolling one must do to get to the answers, and I anticipate that (on sites that don't shut it down) there will be some discussions in some of those collapsed threads and that'll be ok.  In terms of layout, I've been assuming they'll go below the post, which will work at any viewport size; there's an argument to be made for them to be placed to the side on larger viewports, so I'll ask our design folks about that.  (They know way more about the ins and outs of responsive design than I do.)