An example use case: we have some users who are not too happy to have all their account metrics made public (eg: recent reading time, etc) — they feel this is a privacy issue in Discourse that discourages their use of the forum. They would however be happy with the solution of using the Hide my public profile and presence features setting, except it makes it harder for them to be messaged — something they would like to not change. The user card is the easiest way for that and not everyone will figure out the other ways to do it.
I can’t think of a reason why this setting is hiding also the message button from the User card since that depends on a separate setting — it seems that the message button may have been forgotten at some point. Would this be better under bug instead of ux?