Change 313833 had a related patch set uploaded (by DLynch):
ce.CommentNode: inline preview of comment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/313833

I decided to play with this a bit, as can be seen in the patch...

Before:

After:

This is with the comment preview being truncated to 20 characters.

There's also the somewhat visually excessive look of faking some comment markup:

Would be interesting to see on some wiki articles (e.g. Obama). I think it would be styled like the invisible templates, so we can omit the <!-- (a non-wikitext user shouldn't be familiar with that syntax anyway).

With template styling:

Here is Obama:

Seeing the comments inline I'm not so sure it isn't more distracting that useful...

I think it's reasonable. We're not intending to encourage them anyway.

It doesn't seem particularly distracting to me -- I do prefer it to the current experience, at least.

Change 313833 merged by jenkins-bot:
ce.CommentNode: inline preview of comment

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/313833

There may also be pages with lots of comments where this makes the page even less readable.

Just... I think that new users will try to delete theses boxes before save, no ?

If we see a rash of deleted comments in edits on comment-heavy pages, we could perhaps invest in some sort of UX for comments (and invisible templates, which presumably suffer from the same issue) to drive home that they're invisible in the final output. Add some explanatory text to the context item, perhaps?

That said, I don't know if the label style is any more at risk from a rash of deletions than the former just-an-icon style.