Personally I would say HN never had the anti-authoritarian/punk/anarchist ethos of 1990s cypherpunks, rather than having had it once and lost it.

HN culture has always seen multinational companies like Amazon as something to aspire to become, billionaire investors as heroic risk-taker allies, and lauded small companies that get brought out and shut down for achieving an exit.

There's nothing wrong with that, HN's culture is still perfectly valid. But HN hasn't lost an anti-authority ethos, it never had one, from the moment the URL ended with ycombinator.com