REMOVED: I complained about the rewritten title in a way that was excessively harsh and have removed that comment.
When we change titles, we always try to use representative language from the article. I replaced it with a phrase from the article where it says what it's about in a neutral way. I added a hyphen to "recently minted" because it seems to me that grammar requires it. However, if we worship different grammar gods I am happy to let yours hold sway. The hyphen is now toast.
This is bog-standard HN moderation. I dare say the reason you "really really hate it" is probably because you notice the cases you dislike and weight them much more heavily: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Meanwhile the ones you don't find objectionable pass over relatively unnoticed. That is bog-standard HN perception bias.
If we didn't meticulously try to keep titles linkbait-free and less-misleading (more hyphens, sorry!), HN's front page would be completely different, and since the front page is the most important thing here, the entire forum would soon be completely different. That requires editing titles all the time. petercooper, who posted elsewhere in this thread, has an HN title-change tracker (oops, I hyphened again!) which is quite nifty. It doesn't show all of them, though, and it can't tell the difference between moderator edits and submitter edits.
There is a power shortage in my neighborhood and my laptop battery is about to expire, so if you don't see a link momentarily, or if I don't respond anywhere on the site for a few hours, it's because shelter-in-place (uh-oh!) prevents me from finding somewhere else to plug in.
Edit: here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617016. Note how we edited out the bloody pig mask.
Battery is at 2%...
If it goes on too long, and someone has a car nearby, you can use that as a power source. (Be sure to keep the engine running though, otherwise you'll end up with two objects that need a power source...)
I mean, I still had my phone. But moderating HN with a phone is like trying to do surgery with only your thumbs, through a two-inch hole. In the dark.
It's usually not correct to add a hyphen between an adjective and an adverb that modifies it. The case of "recently minted database technologies" matches this rule. Since "linkbait-free" and "title-change" are single adjectives made up of several words each, it's correct to use the hyphen.
However, in the case of "less-misleading", the hyphen is generally incorrect as "less" is an adverb. The exception would be if it precedes an uncountable noun, where "less" could conceivably modify the noun. Example: "less misleading critique" would be ambiguous, so using a hyphen would be appropriate.
Thank you for your attention to detail, dang!