Is Grafana "barely related even tangentially"? No it is quite related.
Have the creators of Cyclotron considered how it compares to existing tools? Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it.
No software developer is obligated to do anything for any of us. It's on US to figure things out and share them as we see fit. Nobody cares if you are willing to invest serious time looking into it or not. Asking a leading question and linking to something most of us have already seen is pointless. Defending it when a good argument was presented is also pointless. I hazard these discourses are linked to age.
Further, there are always new people looking to learn and grow. They shouldn't be looked down upon simply because others got there first.
What makes you think the question was a leading question rather than a genuine one? There isn't enough there to definitively determine the intent in any case, so it's up to whoever responds to decide which way of reading the question they will respond to, and that's an opportunity for the larger software community and for the developers of the projects in question to nurture thier communities. Just because it doesn't have value to you doesn't mean it doesn't have value to others.
To me, it's the spirit of your post that drives many away from software development. This holier-than-thou attitude of how dare someone ask a reasonable question of people who might be able to easily answer, or direct to an answer.
Someone asking a question like this isn't saying, "Hey, next person that comes by, do some research for me" it's saying "Would someone that has already done this research mind sharing their findings?"
Progress in knowledge base communities is driven primarily by building on existing knowledge. The more readily knowledge is shared, the faster progress will be. So having a culture where anyone seeking answers must redo the groundwork that has already been done by others in order to "earn" the answer is an impediment to progress within that community.
Quite frankly, if you want to know it takes five minutes to head over to the respective docs and get a rough idea, as I just did. If you're super-motivated you can even then share your conclusions and tell us "How does it compare: like this, this, and that" (which I won't).
But just shooting a question away like that is not helpful and comes across as lazy.
And lazy? Since when is asking questions is lazy?
People are reading a lot of intent from what was a very plain and straightforward question. What I think would be valuable would be if someone shared why the mere presence of such questions is somehow detrimental to the point that they can't simply be ignored, which I don't think has yet been explained.
It's not the most articulate way of starting the conversation but it is effective.
Would you read a scientific paper on well-established topic X if it omitted a comparison to related work?
X, here, being dashboards.
There's always some arbitrary software mentioned that is often barely related even tangentially and expect someone else to reply with the info.
If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that research is interesting enough YOU post it. Don't expect other people to do it for you, or worse, make it so that the creator of something that might not even be the one linking it feels like they have to justify why they open sourced something.