It seems there was an additional unspoken feature implemented with the new update…..

   Comments in threads no longer stay in chronological order, they become ordered depending on the number of reactions they receive. It also appears to work proactively as all comments in old posts are now organized this way.     To put it quite simply this can make a long comment thread indecipherable to any user after just a handful of reactions. I urge you to look at the comment threads of this post as an example.

    This was a multiple day, back and forth between myself and the publisher with a few others chiming in. It’s very in depth and goes into specifics so there’s no need to try to understand the comments, I ask you to simply attempt to try to read it as the conversation played out. It’s very difficult to say the least without checking the time a comment was left and how many users are tagged in the reply. 

   I think that this was perhaps a very considerate idea to make it easier for Owners and Admins to spot comments with high reactions 🙏, but I dare say it may have more negative effect than good if it makes linear comment threads unreadable. 
Thanks for your consideration. 🙏