To be honest, I had no idea that option existed – and actually, it’s turned off on our instance! I impersonated another moderator on our instance and indeed, they can’t view e-mail addresses.
I swear I had access to see e-mails back when I was “only” a moderator (not an admin) – maybe we had a different setting back then (our instance has gone through quite a journey in the last 8 months).
Thanks a lot for pointing that out.
So that definitely removes some urgency – and generally I would still like to see the platform keep moving towards flexible group-based permissions rather than these more rigid options.