I sincerely hope that this does get some attention from the staff. My belief is that without this there will be a general decline in useful comments. Maybe I am an outlier but I have actually started (a while back before the comments trained ID experiment was announced) tracking all of my ID notes outside of iNat and rarely comment in iNat about my IDs (unless someone specifically asks) due to the locked down nature of these comments. I have a Firefox extension that allows me to tie the observation to a comment (that is not in iNat and instead placed in a place that I control), but this does not help me with all of the comments that I made before I switched over to this mechanism.
My interpretation of the licensing situation for these comments is that they are All Rights Reserved of the creator, other than for iNaturalist itself who we grant a “worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt, and publish” the comments. This allows the site to legally display the comments, distribute them to other users, and maintain the functionality of the platform (e.g., displaying a comment thread). So iNat is well within their rights to ignore this request but I know that for myself this will mean that I will contribute far fewer comments directly to the site since they will essentially be forever locked away.
I suppose one could ask for the data via a CCPA request or similar but that would be a mess for all involved!