The quality of posts at the top of HN has really tanked over the last 2-3 years. Falling from high quality to “programmer clickbait” like the OP here. It’s a little better if you use /classic as a path, which I understand is only calculated by upvotes from users from the first couple years of HN, before the startup boom. Occasionally /news and /classic are virtually identical making me wonder if there are a lack of active OG users and the algo falls back to default during a lack of classic participation.