It progresses toward constructiveness near the end of the thread though, FWIW, so it's worth reading through if you want sort-of-closure I guess.
My only disagreement is with the one person who said that the other people in the group were strongly-opinionated and that it was "healthy". No. Some of the messages in this thread are deeply insulting personal attacks and simply inappropriate to ever submit anywhere.
That you managed to stay focused is impressive. I fear I would have spent _way_ too long on, shall we say, an "appropriate" reply. Actually I might've just up and left, heh.
I appreciate the TIL regarding a community to call out and avoid. Yes, people like the ones found in this thread are everywhere, but to paraphrase something I said on a similar subject recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17730570, see parent comments for context), I have no inclination to field the signal/noise ratio to engage communities where such people are majority vocal. With such people, it seems you have two options - argue against their views and suffer the continuous backlash; or implicitly agree by not arguing, and risk the potential expectation to behave contrary to your personal standards as a result. Alternatively, one simply avoids them, or calls them out.
HN's moderation does a reasonably good job of eliminating such contention. As time goes by I continue to find new ways to appreciate the carefully-curated status quo here. It's certainly not perfect (particularly the automated post-killing system, which kills a small but noteworthy number of good posts) but at least I never have to drown in distraction and meta basically ever, and I have showdead on so I can read the dead comments (and, most importantly, read with the expectation that they might be inflammatory so there's less surprise), so it's pretty good.