> This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist.

There's a fair chance I've misread the situation, but I don't think it's good taste and style is what's being pushed back against in these situations. It's all of the other things that so often get bundled with glossy UI — aesthetics-above-all-else design, UI as branding, gratuitous amounts of badly written analytics JS added by non-engineers, NIH syndrome, trend chasing, etc.

Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenant of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual, but this is staggeringly unusual to the point that something idiosyncratic but simplistic (like the HN UI) is a safer bet.