I think it's same reason why Designing Data Intensive Applications is in the top most popular books on safaribooks for quite some time now.

Many people are grinding for job interviews and many companies now copy FAANG and have a "systems design" round, Paxos/Raft is one of the key topics there, thus it's discovered by more and more people.

I suspect Rust and Jepsen have a hand to play in its growing popularity: personally, I'm much more comfortable implementing or using techniques, algorithms, and patterns in Rust that I would never have risked in a higher level language, let alone in C/C++. The risk calculus just never panned out in their favor because of maintenance and availability of talent concerns. The Rust libraries for Raft and Paxos are much more approachable than my past experience with other implementations and the language itself provides a higher level of confidence. Jepsen, likewise, makes testing distributed systems an approachable problem.

Case in point: I'm currently experimenting with Raft and Paxos with the intent of putting it into production for a service that streams live updates to subscribers over websockets with time sensitive business logic that must only be executed once per object on a timer. Before Rust, I would have just slung the whole problem over to whichever infrastructure team was a glutton for punishment so that they could set up Consol/kafka/debezium/whatever and set a reminder three months from now to revisit the issue.

I don't know if there is any specific reason with Paxos, but HN front-page topics always tend to be somewhat thematically-related, so no real surprise here.

One of those topics which hits the right balance of sufficiently useful, interesting and understandable without too much training.

Distributed consensus is quite hot - like blockchain tech. This is another aspect of that?

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

I think it's because distributed consensus is a pattern which is growing in use exponentially as people wake up to all the disadvantages of huge centralized services.