It’s legitimately a problem.
I’d take a WAG that… 75%? of flags are either drive-by trollies, or spammers.
That means 75% of the community time flagging is spent on this issue, as is some amount of Mod time (it’s less than 75% because less “work” is done by mods on obviously inappropriate posts, and Discourse makes nuking spammers and TL0 drive-by’s from orbit simple, but it’s still easily 50% of time).
On top of that, there’s the much more annoying problem that drive-by-trollies inevitably derail conversations, whether it’s because of counter-trolley posts, derailing jokes, or lost effort from collateral deletions when the user is removed, affecting users who spend time trying to formulate a legitimate response to the issue.
This second issue - derailing - would indeed be solved by some sort of TL0 approval queue (since their posts wouldn’t be seen), but with the added cost that 1) the community would be approving first-time posts instead of flagging them, and 2) there’d obviously be a delay before first time users’ posts would appear (since they’d need to be approved).
