I wish dang would remove the flag function or modify it in some way. I understand it's there to stop spam, flamewars, etc but it can be abused and kill any chance of a decent debate.
The OP is fine in its original context of an OpenBSD mailing list—that's a focused-enough system to respond coherently. A large, weakly cohesive forum like HN is more like all the mailing lists put together in a blender. Posting the same message to this context amplifies the provocation by 1000x, if not 100000x, and the thread will fill up with comments by the self-selected most-provoked on all sides. This leads to boring, shallow comments, an effect which compounds as more comments appear. This is a failure mode for HN.
We've learned over the years that threads are sensitive to initial conditions: the same forum can respond either substantively or with meltdowns on the same topic, depending on small perturbations. If the goal is high-quality discussion (or, let's be reasonable, as quality as possible under the circumstances), the place to focus on is the starting conditions.
When a provocative post like this gets flagged sufficiently to remove the thread from circulation, the flags are usually coming from a coalition of users: one set who dislike/disagree with the author, and one set who recognize the thread as a failure mode for HN. That goes for all provocative topics, not just programming ones.
[1] I've written a lot about this in terms of comments—i.e. a comment's quality is the expected value of the subthread that it is the root of—but as in many things, you can treat a submission as a kind of root comment and the argument works the same way: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...