Now there's one less tool to help the victim of such abuse though.

It's not that there's one less tool. It's that the tool given to begin with was wrong for that purpose, and instead of leveraging the technology in beneficial ways, they're removing it.

They could have implemented in the account settings somewhere where you can let it alert you for any such usage of your face, but without it doing any auto-tagging or other publicly visible things which we usually complain about.

This comment to me shows that it’s impossible to keep the public happy. HN likes to rail on all these big tech companies amassing and abusing data, and here as they go deleting one of the most Orwellian parts it gets complaints.

Knowing outlines of how online harassment happens, I'm confident it would do far more harm than help in this context. Weaponized autism is real.