HN doesn't run on upvotes alone; it's a constitutional democracy. The constitution is https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and this story is unconstitutional.
If 500-point stories on hot topics were dispositive, HN would be a 500-point-stories-on-hot-topics site. It isn't that kind of site, and intervention is required to keep it from going that way.
This is a clear case of 'if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic', so it's worth dwelling on. It doesn't mean the story is unimportant (on the contrary), but that it doesn't fit the mandate of the site. Sometimes there are exceptions, and this isn't one.