I think that's unfortunate: the article still has that title, and knowing it wants to lead to such an absolute conclusion can tell a prospective reader if they are interested to be led down that path or not.

That approach to baity titles doesn't generalize, I'm afraid—neither to users in general, nor to titles in general. In general, baity titles cause threads to fill up with responses to the provocation in the title, making for shallow and ultimately off-topic discussion.

It's standard practice on HN to replace these with titles that are more accurate and neutral, but we always try to do this using representative language from the article itself. Usually that's a subtitle, or the HTML doc title, sometimes it can be the URL slug, or even a photo caption.

Often there's a sentence at the start of the article that immediately walks back the title and says what the article is 'really' about. It's as if the title claims way too much and then the article 'confesses' and gives most of it back. These sentences often make good HN titles because they're far more accurate representations of the article. That's what I used in this case.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You are right that it does not generalize: but in this particular case, it was really reflective of the article which was shallow itself (IMO at least).

So I guess that the rule doesn't generalize either, but I can at least understand the reasoning behind it and accept that it might work better on average — thanks for the explanation!