Hello there, @bmvaughn ...

If you search through the past few pages of questions here: Canvas Question Forum - Instructure Community ... you will find a handful of topics that are asking similar questions.  Within the past week or so, there has been a blog post posted by Sam which hopefully might help to address some of the questions/concerns that you and others have: Addressing Your Feedback on Recent Discussion Checkpoints Changes.  I'd encourage you to fill out the survey that she has linked in her blog post.  Also, you might want to consider posting a comment to the bottom of her blog post so that she can review your feedback and take your comments back to her team for consideration as they work to improve the functionality.

Also, you may want to reach out to your school's Canvas administrator(s) or someone from your school's Online Learning / eLearning / Distance Learning team.  They may be interested in reading Sam's blog as well.  They may also be able to tell you when and why they made the decision to turn this on within your Canvas courses.

I hope this will be of some help to you.