Same with me. I either
read the topic to its end and use the topic Reply.
use the post menu Reply (most often to respond to “tangential” questions)
select - quote Reply as in this post.
Having a Reply to Topic in the timeline doesn’t seem useful to me.
The only scenario I can think of, that I might, but have not once yet, want to use that button is if I read the topic, went back to an earlier post to check “what was it he said?”, and then didn’t quote, reply to that post, or want to scroll back down.