They did more than lock it, they deleted it for rule 7. (which, I'm fine with the rule 90% of the time, but mods clearly understood this was a special case. Deleting the thread after 200 comments is such a weird thing)
Eh, the original mod got banned, two separate admins showed up to humiliate themselves for absolutely no reason and one caught a temp ban lmao. Mission accomplished
And you can't view deleted posts from lemmy.ml by clicking on them in their modlog the way you can with hexbear. This is just the standard there.
In other words, people logged in to an account on lemmy.ml who see in the modlog that a post was deleted will only see "error_couldnt_find_post" if they click on it hoping to see what it was. For a lemmy.ml account, none of that post content or the comment thread it generated is visible, just gone.
To see what used to be there, you have to get to it from a hexbear account.