Sometimes a user posts consecutively and replying to each member in form of separate post then in those cases moderator give their time to merge those posts into one to avoid unnecessary extra posts. Some users, mostly newbies do such kind of consecutive posting.
Looks like the mods are being nice, merging the post when they could've just deleted it since it broke the forum rules.
32. Posting multiple posts in a row (excluding bumps and reserved posts by the thread starter) is not allowed.
I usually respond to different comments from different people by using a separate post, since that is common sense.
In this case the moderator is blindly following 'rules' without understanding the point of the rule, so he or she merges posts.
Obviously the rule about consecutive posts was not meant for different responses to different people on a thread.