I peek at articles all the time without upvoting, and upvote articles without commenting all the time.

I was skeptical at first as well, but your own stats show a different picture: the site gets a lot of views, which correlates with the upvotes. No comments is probably due to the fact that people use upvoting as a mechanism to save links to material (which might be of use later)

To clarify, I don't think this is improper use of the upvote mechanism, I was just hoping for more engagement with the comment feature of Hacker News, given the 7k click thrus.

That's just what you've achieved :-) Probably not the way you intended it, though

Ironically, more comments about your meta-comment.

Half the upvotes are probably for the Rick and Morty reference.

My take: not everyone has time to read this right now. I use upvote to "bookmark", and I expect not everyone here use Java. I am not, but I intend to give it a round at some point.

How do you know it has 7K views?