You are correct and reasonable. Thank you for your follow-up response.
I do think that HN's biggest problem is a pervasive and long-standing culture of "asshole" behavior in comments, so anything you and the HN team can do to fight back against it, to set a better example, is gold.
Yes, the rest of the comment was fine, which is why we left it unkilled, despite the tedious tangent it provoked.