I especially remember that in the first few years of HN there was an expectation that everyone had read Paul Graham's essays and would recognize references to them.

It's almost as if communities have inside jokes or something.

Those are also poor titles. Instead of a useful title, it's just another pun.

Exactly - these posts don't exist in a vacuum.

More importantly, the posts weren't written for HN specifically, but in the context of discussing the open web and WebASM. Within that community this reference will be pretty obvious.