I suppose on nested views, you’re not supposed to “read it all” as opposite to a flat view. You’re meant to direct your attention to branches instead.
Is that how it’s supposed to be used?
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That’s exactly it, you nailed it.
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And then there is the unsolved issue: how does a user know what branch has info/opinions interesting enough 
That would be a nightmare’ish for moderation. But as said several times — if the nested thingy will be reality at some point, there is no force to start using it, unless community (meaning quite often what an admin desires 
) wants or likes it.
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Here’s one reply to your comment to test the nesting.
On Reddit, I tend to consider each top-level comment as “mini topics”. I find one interesting, and then I read as much as I can from it, which is limited by the usability of this interface. Which means I’m probably missing interesting comments because they were too deep, or inside a sub-branch I didn’t expand.
The difference between Reddit and Discourse is that whatever they are called, I rarely consider Reddit replies in higher esteem than mere “comments”. Rarely interesting, rarely more than a single sentence, rarely high-effort or value adding, and, of course, often dispensable (and riddled with trolls and bots).
On Discourse, or at least on meta (even if Discourse emphasizes this by philosophy), replies are much more substantial and deserve to be read.
Which makes the nested view, at least on meta, particularly unfit, if not incompatible.
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Yes, you’re absolute right about this. It’s not something we would recommend for the vast majority of communities. I think it’ll only make sense for quite large communities like game forums. I used to watch professional League of Legends and the subreddit would have post-game discussions with thousands of people discussing. That would be a perfect use case, where you can’t read everything. You don’t want to read everything.