It's not the same, though yes I think the desire to constantly discuss the culture wars (and maybe coordinated campaigns) by people online is a large part is what's changed.
I've been running analytics on HN recently. It's all getting prepped into a bigger blog post, but for now this is just my observations.
HN is:
* More hostile every year, with a huge inflection point after COVID
* Talking less about STEM (and moderately less about business/finance) and more about politics every year, with the biggest inflection change around COVID
* Decreasing the number of sentences and words in each post year on year.
* An increasing amount of positive or negative sentiment comments with a sharp rise in 2024
* Always a higher number of negative comments than positive comments, with a sharp rise in negative comments in 2024
The trajectory of HN does not look good. Today's HN is getting more hostile, more negative, more political, and has shorter more off-the-cuff comments than it used to.
But in all honesty I don't think there's any way to fix this without fundamentally changing the site. It's no coincidence that so much of the site changed over COVID. In my experience, anonymous and pseudonymous online communities all became much more hostile from COVID onward. Those are just the people that hang out online these days. Any change to counteract this would probably involve fundamentally changing HN's rules, ranking, and sorting. My guess is the mods have largely "given up" on this and treat HN as a sort of maintenance node community, in a sort of late stage management role.