Compared to how most of the attention in a traditional forum will go to people trying to respond to the TC/OP? Even in cases where 4-5 pages in the TC already resolved the issue?

The only benefit for a forum is that it "bumps" a topic when you participate in it, so you can keep a topic alive. But that isn't too difficult for a threaded style forum to replicate. That just wasn't how Reddit wanted topics to work (nor HN, in our case). Reddit never even implemented a way to subscribe to a topic despite a 3rd party extension having a feature for over a decade.