It arguably doesn’t much matter in this case, where it’s hard not to hear about it in some way. In other cases, it strikes me as an abdication of responsibility.

Most recently, as but one example, when the tech community embarked on their ethics-in-astronomy harassment campaign against a female programmer: HN was one of the fora where this actually happened, but all submissions of stories on it, from reputable mainstream news sources, were quickly flagged into oblivion.

HN is first and foremost community moderated: flagging it is action that affects ranking.

The official mods can negate or tweak community moderation effects, but there is no action from them necessary to give effect to flags.