Actually, from my perspective I thought this was a really interesting idea, then wondered why we don’t use it everywhere all the time and figured there must be some cons that have prevented us from doing this before.

Some of the “negative” HN comments gave me exactly the information I was interested in that the article hadn’t mentioned.

"X is a safety risk (perhaps it could be designed differently)" is a helpful safety warning to others, not just "let me list my opinion of problems".

Do you harsh on people who remind you how dangerous it is to work on live electrical outlets or wear long sleeves in a chemistry lab?

Personally i find people who treat everything as positive and refuse to acknowledge fundamental problems just as annoying who view things as utterly negative and only point out problems without trying to find solutions.

So you're saying that relying on experience and the laws of physics are a bad thing?

Inspectors of finished works

Well, okay guys, I'll give you a "solution" since this is proposing to use RF anyway. Instead of doing it entirely wirelessly use a very thin conductor surface wave transmission line (SWTL). That way only one conductor is needed and the RF energy is mostly contained within a wavelength or so of the SWTL (think "inside-out waveguide). The conductor can be very thin, like 28 awg. Or, for spanning larger distance, SWTL mode has been demonstrated on twisted aluminum cord used in normal power lines. It's just a matter of adapting the coaxial to SWTL launcher (sort of cone).

Except "Surface Wave Transmission Lines" leak.

A lot.

What's the point of wireless power if you use a wire?

The modern western world loves Safety(TM). This isn't a bad thing. Obviously we don't want people getting killed in industrial accidents all the time. However, as a side effect any platform (HN, Reddit, Twitter, whatever) which quantifies people's opinions is going to tend toward shallow pearl clutching when it comes to topics like this. People realize that when they make some shallow (shallow has the nice side effect of giving you a wide potential audience) comments about GoodThings(TM) like Safety(TM) their virtue score goes up.

So every time some topic comes up, no matter how mundane or niche it is, there will inevitably be tons of people tripping over each other to score cheap virtue points by going after obvious trad-offs. "What about safety", "what about the poors", people ask questions like that even though they already know and don't care about the answer because their lizard brain knows that when they do that the number in the top right corner gets bigger.

That's just how modern gamified social media is.

You've got the wrong attitude. It's crucial to thoroughly explore a problem space before launching into half-baked "solutions" that risk compounding complexity.