Q1: See the help page:
Any post which currently has an active close vote or a close flag will appear in the Close Votes review queue.
The same review process will occur, the only difference is that the post will enter the review queue with one close vote less. The difference for the user wh...
Saying that you should no longer flag for moderator attention to have questions closed seems to be in contradiction with "There is absolutely no difference".
The reason I am asking this is the discussion which started here:
Why are you wasting the moderators' time by flagging things as duplicate rather than casting votes like you are supposed to? — Tobias Kildetoft2 hours ago
As long as you have close vote privileges, it doesn't matter. The system automatically converts them into the exact same action. — Pops ♦May 18 '11 at 20:43
It's not literally the same thing, casting a flag is "doing it the wrong way", and casting a close vote is "doing it the right way". But apart from that, once you have the privilege, a close flag (be it duplicate, off-topic or whatever the flag dialogue offers) is converted to a close vote.
At least as long as one hasn't run out of close votes for the day. I don't know whether the system doesn't let you cast a close flag when you've run out of votes or it does and treats it like a close flag from a < 3k user. The latter would make more sense.
But running out of close votes is rare, @MartinSleziak, I have only ever managed that during the homework removal.
Oh I see. This is the quote from the Najib's answer: "The user will use up one of their daily votes (but not one of their flags and it will not affect their flagging history at all)."
So if I flag to close as a duplicate, I will not see the flag in my flag summary, right?
That post was certainly no auto-deleted - I guess from the number of upvotes. IIRC when somebody delete their account, only negatively voted posts are deleted.
Now I looked at the timeline and it says: "User 133894 destroyed".
Prompted by this question, it appears there are two methods of disabling user accounts permanently: deleting and "destroying"
What are the differences between the two and what are the criteria that determine which method is used?