Maybe you’re having a hard time understanding, but having a thread directly under announcements naturally encourages engagement—psychologically and from a UX standpoint (the natural flow of scrolling, visibility, etc.). This applies to both lurkers and contributors, allowing people to follow along (without extra work), or even feeling validated by other users’ words and joining the conversation when they had no prior intention.
I personally had no trouble following that thread, but I’m happy to give grace to those who did struggle. Some people in the thread had real questions, and they should have been moved to their own post. I’m so glad we both recognize and agree this is a pain point, but we also need to make note that just because somebody mentions something off-topic (in blanket statements and general discourse regarding recent distaste for changes, etc.), doesn’t mean they belong in a different post/topic.
One thing I’m failing to understand is why you think moderating a single thread and moving off-topic comments (because they should be going through each comment to do their job 
) to new or pre-existing threads as needed using a single button (and giving it a title, if needed) is “a hell of a lot of work”, but bouncing between scattered posts (across multiple webpages), merging/deleting duplicate posts while moderating each comment section (new/existing) to keep things on topic and branch them out where needed is “way easier”? They should have already been doing this; this “new” system doesn’t negate the need for it to be done, but they opted to close natural discourse and force the extra workload on themselves to be more efficient? They’re doing an awful job at selling me the narrative that this isn’t damage control when large topics are not, have not, and never will be the issue—I’m in plenty of forums (some much larger) that handle this without any issue.
But yeah, agree to disagree, I guess. 