You could use "quotes" to format quotes. Just a suggestion.

> Honestly, I have no idea what is the right way to format quotes.

Most people on HN do this. It doesn't format the quote in any way, but it works.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's fine. People can scroll on mobile to work around a poor design that fails to take into account styling norms such as indenting quotes.

Don’t worry about it too much. A large part of the problem is that HN comments don’t have a method of delineating quotes, so people default to this because it looks fine on desktop.

You did the right thing. No need to apologise. Don't listen to the whiners with Stockholm syndrome.