Generally speaking, I don’t think that this would work. Lots of threads here are fairly long and rambling, and cover lots of issues around the initial first question that was asked. Who on earth should “own” this thread for example? 
What happened here seems to have been a bit of a “moderation cockup”. To be fair, it’s worth mentioning that Discourse’s moderation tools are extremely user-hostile and appear to be entirely undocumented**. When something turns up in the moderation queue from memory there are only binary options available and it isn’t clear to a new moderator*** what they do.
** at least, a search for “moderation tools” in this forum does not find anything. There seems to be nothing here or here.
*** and given the age of the site, we’re all “new moderators” here.