Ask HN: Does FDA public comment make a difference?

Was taking a look at the FDA comment section for the new menthol cigarette ban, there's like 90k comments.

Does anyone actually read all of these? Most of them seem to be like facebook esque in terms of quality, I assume the admin in charge doesn't care either way and afaik there's no penalty for ignoring them.

Maybe there's a kind of data analysis tool here? Anyone in govt know?

https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2021-N-1349-0001