For me it’s a lot more than a few bad apples. It’s the general state of discourse and empathy from a reasonably large chunk of the user base.

HN was never perfect (since I found it), but it’s much worse now.

To be fair this has happened in general to a number of sites/thing in the exact same timeline. It’s not an HN specific problem, other than the degree to which such people may be attracted to the usual HN spheres.