I never deleted my Reddit account precisely because I go in there periodically and find some of my comments became un-deleted, so I have to go back in and scrub them again to try to keep my content off the site.
That, and when I am Googling something and find a relevant thread on Reddit with the answer, I hate being defaulted to New Reddit, where half the comments are also buried and need to be manually opened to read more. Having an account logged in with the Old Reddit toggle is the simplest way around that (though wouldn't surprise me if someone made a browser extension for that).
Not a bad strategy, though for as bad as the native search feature is on Reddit, the native search feature on Lemmy is 10x worse. Basically, if it's not indexed by Google, there's no way to search for something specific.
I go out of my way to save content locally that interests me because I assume if I don't, it is effectively lost to time.