I’m with you 100% here, and this is exactly why I don’t think an automated reminder would be super effective. In my opinion, the recipients of your comments appreciate your input because it is sincere and hand-written (or at least hand copied-and-pasted). If the system is the one providing the reminder, that feels less sincere, e.g. “This can’t be that important if they assigned this task to a robot.” Remember Clippy, or Jimmy Wales’ heartfelt midwinter pleas.
Honestly, if anything on iNat really wears on you like this, just don’t do it! I think welcoming new users is valuable, but it is really time consuming. IMO, it’s totally fine to just add identifications and follow up with an explanation if someone asks for one.
That is annoying, and also largely indicative of a failure on our part to communicate what iNat is about, i.e. people who don’t want IDs don’t seem to realize they’re on the wrong website, because all new observations need IDs on iNat, and if they don’t want external input they should just enter data in a spreadsheet or scream their findings into the void or something. It does suck to be on the receiving end of someone’s occasionally irate confusion (those of us on staff kind of get a lot of it), but while a measured response is always ideal, I think it’s also ok to just point people toward https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/help#coarse-ids