Sorry, but I’m confused. Do you mean it requires WP comments to be enabled, or that it requires “Use Discourse Comments” to be enabled? Or both?
Big picture, I would expect that “Link to Comments Without Displaying Them” would still allow all the other settings and functionality to work, just without loading and display actual comments from Discourse. In fact, I would also expect that by choosing that setting, WP comments could even be turned off without breaking any functionality, since we aren’t actually displaying any comments. (But that’s a separate issue: Why enable wordpress post comments?)
Does that make sense?
I think a workaround could be to just turn on comment loading, then enable the “Only Import Moderator-Liked” setting. But that would require me to ban moderators from liking posts. Seems like a bad idea. lol