How to handle "bad" moderation?

Something I always hated about some reddit mods is when they'd just lock and nuke a whole thread instead of targeting the people who were the problem. I get it's a volunteer job and you can't do that when it's two thousand comments but sometimes they're important topics on an important forum, I'd rather see a "unmoderated" flag put on a thread that has gone out of control than see it completely shut down.

Maybe some alternatives to completely nuking threads, like an "unmoderated" tag for large threads that have gotten away from mod teams that they don't want to just kill, could be a unique feature that could be implemented. Apps could give a "this thread is unmoderated and it's contents might not follow community guidelines" warning, which users could disable if they wanted. It'd be a nice alternative to shutting down discussions entirely.

I think I saw a couple comments where people were "getting into it" and not contributing to the discussion. I just don't get why the mod didn't remove those and leave the rest. They gave up on the post too early IMO, but I guess I could be asking too much of a volunteer.

It does seem heavy-handed though. If the mod had had enough of the cat-fighting, they could have simply locked the comments instead of removing the post itself.

The only reason to go that far would be if the submitted content contravened the community's rules.

How do you check the mod log?