Sadly the front page is subjected to manual steering from HN mods. This is most likely how we get submissions like this to be successful here.
Re "manual steering", that's just another way of saying "moderated" or "curated" (or, some people's favorite, "censored") - no? HN is a curated site and always has been: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We don't tend to boost submissions like the OP though.
If you want to see the sort that we do boost, there are lots of examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool and https://news.ycombinator.com/invited.
Edit: found it, it's probably the second chance pool: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#second...