I'd love to know what the magic recipe that GitLab uses to be so prominently in-your-face at all times on HN.
There is also the 'FOSS version of a popular proprietary thing' angle and the openness of the project that means there is more news about it to post.
In general, it feels pretty natural to me it would get posted about a lot, and upvoted a lot.
Frankly, I didn't expect the issue bash to get upvoted. We have our postmortem coming in a few minutes. I'm sure that will be much discussed here. We considered postponing that post but we promised it for this week and feel like we owe it to our users.
I've instructed all our people not to submit articles to HN but we can't prevent others from posting.
There's a standard moderation penalty for submissions whose only content is rallying users to some cause or event, since (however good the cause) that isn't intellectually interesting.