Yes, you missed that dozens of these stories have been spending significant time on HN's front page, including the story you mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13514802, which has 500 points and 300 comments.
People tend to form conclusions about HN more by the strength of their passion on a topic than by the actual data. In other words, there's usually sample bias at work. There's a lot more politics on HN right now than there usually is, which is appropriate since it reflects what's going on right now. But obviously we're not going to let the politics dominate, because that would kill the site.
I wrote more about this here if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13516969.