I cannot put into words how profoundly stupid this “feature” is. AOL and Geocities pages were genuinely more user friendly. Whoever added it, refreshed the page and said “yeah, this works well” and left it in should be fired! …out of a cannon and into the Sun!
Probably both, since I doubt that the Lemmy devs would move only half the site away from web sockets. They probably use similar enough code behind the scenes that a change to that would affect both posts and comments.