Haven’t you heard? The new definition of hacker is a 40something year old making 300k a year writing adtech tracking code for a FAANG

Ageism here is unwarranted. I'd assume there are now more 40something years olds keeping the traditional hacker values (before "hacker" became to mean "dude stealing money from gullible strangers over the internet") than there are 20something years olds. Because they actually might have been the part of that old hacker culture (not sure if it even exists now?). Now even in the best tech schools they'd probably teach you the most important thing on the internet (after the adtech of course) is to make AIs to ban "hate speech" and "misinformation". And if the independent hacker culture still exists, it's certainly not easy to find among the noise.

It has been wild watching this crowd slowly morph over the past decade or so, largely, into exactly what feels like this.

Just because you're a hacker doesn't mean you have to be an anarchist, anti-state extremist.

I think you may mistake the individuals for the whole. HN as a social center can be corrupted and coopted without any of the original individuals changing their behaviors, simply by adding more individuals with different behaviors. If by "they" you mean the individuals, your statement would then be incorrect, while if you mean the community gestalt, it would be correct.

Good point.