It seems more concerning that it is a symptom of federation failure. It may get you the local messages, but it also is a sign of how data is not flowing reliably between your local Lemmy instance and the remote instance that is hosting the community. If you are the first one to join a community, it may not have registered with the remote - and posts/comments may not be flowing.

Of greater concern is that if small updates like this aren’t making it between Lemmy instances, how many comments are missing? Set Github bug on evidence of missing comments: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3101