I'm not seeing a big disagreement here, except that in my view you're badly underestimating how common, and how toxic, it is for users to hurl these accusations at others simply because they disagree with them. That's a cheap, vulgar move that has nothing to do with actual astroturfing, it's by far the most common phenomenon in this space (and growing), and it poisons the community. Therefore people aren't allowed to do that on HN.

"Sometimes it's important to highlight a poster's potential bias" is covered by the site guideline that asks you to send such concerns to [email protected] rather than posting them in the threads. In the vast majority of cases that I see, it's not hard to establish that the accusation of shillage is wrong and that the user was just expressing their personal view—unless you think the Chinese government planted people on HN years ago to establish posting histories about Julia or whatever.

Legit HN users have a right not to be dressed down or have their histories hauled out by a flash mob that doesn't like what they said. If you're concerned that someone is breaking the site guidelines or otherwise abusing HN, please contact us privately.

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