I've never seen any slightly contrary opinion upvoted at all, so any depth would be better than none. But "Putin = Hitler" is the shallowest and most boring take there is, and those are upvoted ad nauseam by the intelligentsia. So depth certainly does not correlate with popularity.

Paywalls maybe. I've seen lots of paywalled articles on the front page too though so I'm also skeptical about that explaining it.