I understood it as only related to reposts. I could see it helpful to have 2 settings:

- “Don’t see reposts of this note” which would affect only a single note. This would be useful when a single popular post shows up in your feed too much.

- “Don’t reposts of this user’s notes” which would affect all reposts of notes from that particular user. This would be useful when you follow a particularly popular account that always gets reposted by everyone.

Not sure if that is what the others in the thread meant by it though.