Besides its being off topic, one reason the site guidelines ask you not to comment on voting is that it takes time for the community's reaction to settle. Hasty downvotes get corrected by fair-minded users who give corrective upvotes. The comment you're talking about is now well into positive territory.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Well, the thread was partly a metathread about our culture, so I don't consider it off topic. It seemed particularly tangible and demonstrative in a thread with a lot of subjective back and forth.

And maybe the comment would have been upvoted on its own. Maybe not. It's hard to draw a conclusion either way after the fact. I just did what seemed to be the right thing at the time. Anonymously upvoting and shaking my head didn't seem enough.