It's too bad.  I really encourage anyone who wants to see a change on the map to create an account versus making an anonymous note.  I mean, I suspect your friend also created https://www.openstreetmap.org/note/5248300 which was clear enough for me to go ahead and add exactly as said.  This is a "good" note that anyone can verify.  But notes that are ambiguous and need clarification...and an anonymous note can't be clarified... will get closed.  No hard feelings I hope, but it's the way to clear the notes we can't act upon so we don't get confused as more and more notes get added for attention.

I wouldn't say this is a regional rule or anything either, just a personal pet peeve that a bunch of other mappers adopted.  I think with this adoption I've noticed the number of open notes in the USA have dropped significantly -- when I first investigated notes, we were up near 44000 open notes in the USA and going up.  Now thanks to a bunch of people we're down to 22000 and trending down instead of up.  We encourage people to make clear notes that aren't ambiguous as to what needs to be done and having an account makes us happier when we can ask for more details when something isn't clear, and also helps out weed out copyright infringements if they admit to an improper source.