Author thought that having ASLR is absolutely must (hint: it's not[1].) HardenedBSD is poorly reviewed ASLR implementation by a person who didn't take criticism well + recommended new defaults from subj.
Later hBSD added neat things like different update mechanism (hint: it's the same minus delta patches), retpoline enabled by default a little earlier than FreeBSD and probably still haven't disabled it.
It's a fact that FreeBSD had poor defaults for ages and only recently (last couple of years) started cleaning things up. That said I never seen FreeBSD user running default system settings. Many not even running GENERIC kernel, me included.
I think FreeBSD has a lot of issues, but 90% are political bullshit.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/new-a...