When I add a comment to a sheet, the "SAVE' button stays greyed out. This makes me think that comments won't be saved unless I do an additional action that enables the 'SAVE' button and then click the 'SAVE' button.
Comments are save immediately, so no save is required. The same is true for Reminders, Notifications, Sharing, Web Forms, etc.
Save is really for the sheet itself. Sorry it isn't clear!
Thanks for clarifying that. It wasn't obvious to me.
But wait... There's more!
Adding a comment (or attachment) does not count as a change to the sheet. Well, not the way you think it might.
If you change a comment on a row, this does not trigger the row variable "modified", which will flag when something in the cells has changed. As such, it does not prompt you to save the sheet. So from your visual perspective, you have changed something on the sheet, but from the system perspective you have not.
I'm not perfectly sure how they link the attachments and comments to the rows without linking them to sheet changes, but they do it somehow.