but the users are being manipulated. The vast majority will never look at the mod log and never realise that the comments they’re seeing have been editorialised.

Hence, what I mentioned two times: the need to inform them by opening the discussion first.
Users don’t need to be gifted/attributed a new leader/mod. They need to decide by themselves if they need a new one, or not.

Also, if there is no clue that a comment has been removed/censored (isn’t there some default text displayed?), then that should be something to discuss with Lemmy’s devs as I don’t think deleting comments should be invisible.