Of course, there's no way to know. But do you 100% honestly believe reaching the frontpage of HN yesterday had nothing to do with the appeal being accepted today?
He filed the appeal, he didn’t wait for the result. The result has now come in. It’s a massive assumption to attribute that result to media attention.
Perhaps if your only experience of the Apple review process is hearing about it when it pops up on Hacker News then it’s easy to make the assumption that the media did this, because the media is always involved in those cases. But this is what happens without the media getting involved as well.
Not sure I agree that it guaranteed it but I do agree with you that it very likely had an impact - it would have come up on someone's radar.