Turning off Comment Navigator in the settings unfortunately doesn’t do anything for me wrt my volume buttons. Doesn’t matter what I set it to, it still eats my volume presses and uses it for comment navigation.

This is definitely a setting that should be off by default. Hijacking hardware buttons and changing their function is a huge no-no, IMO.

Edit: Comment Navigator seems to refer to the “Done”, “Hide”, “Parent”, etc. buttons above a selected comment.