The "story" built here and in other articles is the minimal believable tale that gets rid of current generally older tenants to make those units available for people with more money. To reach the front page of HN, it only needs to be believable to those who will benefit from its implementation. Not a very high hurdle and usually easily reach by hand waving some misunderstood "free market" juvenilia.
Which is convenient as they'd like to use their superior purchasing power to acquire nice SF apartments, and rent control blocks them from that goal. So it helps to have economics on your side, to a) make you feel better about yourself and b) to convince others to join your side.
Maybe in this case that's "right", but the fact that we are collectively upvoting the economics that helps us and not approvingly discussing some other economic theory about how importing low-wage software developers would boost the economy makes it political.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9246255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884775
But more importantly, I'm not sure what you mean by "people of privilege are working out a story that allows them to displace." As far as I can tell, what's happening is that landlords own property, and they see an opportunity to rent the property to someone who is willing to pay more. I'm not sure what "story" is being worked out by the new renter; by the time they find out about the property, it is already on the market.