Not consolidating replies is easy to spot and work with users on. With badges it’s not always obvious if a borderline nonconstructive post is trying to farm badges or not. These are the kind of posts where it’s not clear if nonconstructiveness was intentional and/or users walk the line – taking action would be pedantic on an individual scale, but on a large scale it’s especially noticeable.
The problem might have been that we had 100% of our users tasked with earning badges at once when we migrated, so I’m not sure if the problem would still be so prevalent. We might try to re-enable them in the future, or try to tailor them to discourage not specifically badge farming, but farming with nonconstructive actions.