Reiterating a point I made on slack for public consideration: there's currently a clash of philosophies between the edit links and the reply buttons. On a page you can't edit (for whatever reason) the "edit" tab becomes "view source" and the edit section links are entirely removed, but the reply buttons remain and tell you why you can't edit if you attempt to. Ultimately it might be a good idea to bring these two ways of editing a page into alignment on this topic.

I'm sort of ideologically inclined as part of the wiki movement towards keeping edit links visible everywhere as a way to reinforce that the pages could be editable if you log in / become autoconfirmed / whatever. I'm not actually sure which is better from a product-usability perspective, though...

In T353079#9394422, @DLynch wrote:

I'm sort of ideologically inclined as part of the wiki movement towards keeping edit links visible everywhere as a way to reinforce that the pages could be editable if you log in / become autoconfirmed / whatever.

I second that, for wikis where the regular editing process is open. For wikis where the regular editing process is closed (like wikitech which requires to login), removing the reply link can be justified.