It's presumably because of this item in the submission guidelines:

> If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

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

The rules work 99% of the time but the automation of the rules some times make it so a little manual work is needed

For what it's worth, I appreciate the rules. The experience is much better for me! But I don't typically submit articles, so I'm never impacted by the manual effort.

Manual curation is what makes or breaks this site, I've had several interactions with dan and he's an excellent person.

They even will try and surface good content that didn't make it to the home page with a second chance pool ymmv

In this case, I think the rule is still good. "3 Republicans" is a baity title imo. It would have been better reworded, possibly just to "California's magic mushroom bill", or not submitted if it's only about the 3 Republicans, the politics angle doesn't accomplish much.

“Gratuitous” is a critical word in that guideline (“gratuitous” is not, itself, gratuitous); if removing the number substantiallly changes the connotation (or, a fortiori, denotation, but that's not an issue here) then the number isn't gratuitous.

Yes, in which case you're supposed to go back and manually edit the title. The automation doesn't always work but it nudges things in the right direction.