It's a sad place if you assume all the flaws in the article are obvious to everyone, then reduce everyones behavior to "orange man bad", and then complain about how it's a sad place.
Given that this is generally place of intelligent people, it should be concerning that they didn't pick up on the fact that the article is quite obviously using a massive portion of the population to inflate their argument (16-20 year olds). This is likely the effect of the argument fitting in with everyone's preferred narrative.
When you point out the very obvious flaws, it gets you downvoted as well because orange man bad. HN has become a sad place just like everywhere else.