Worth noting that someone else usually writes the headline for the articles, not the journalist / the author of an article.

OK, but that doesn't excuse things. There's a problem with journalism and its mostly about how they are incentivized and compensated. I don't know what the fix is but its clear that trust is so low, and rightfully so that journalism has largely failed as an industry at its job.

Journalism is paid for by ads, mostly. For online journalism, unless people click there is no money to pay the producers. Hence clickbait. This is a problem but there are worse problems.

In my opinion the requirement that HN submissions match the article's title is quite absurd because of this phenomenon.

Uh, that isn't the rule, for exactly that reason.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've seen many cases where mods revert an informative title in favor of a less informative one. Also, the idea that the title of a submission should match the title of the resulting article is quite silly, since often the article is written for a different audience and the informed HN submitter can sometimes craft a title that better summarizes to HN readers why the story is interesting / worth reading / controversial.

Expected, yes. Reasonable or acceptable, no.

But what can you do about it?