I have seen a lot of quality discussion on HN comment section even if the comment does not align with the article completely. Usually the comments are related to the topic of the article and not completely to the article written itself. Which is how it should be otherwise we would just have pretty narrowed down comment section.
Maybe the site has NewsGuard and a lot of people are unable to read it without giving up privacy to do so.
Well, the article is behind a paywall. Since HN tolerates such articles (and has no culture of expecting OP to provide a way around the paywall apparently), I feel like it's somewhat the fault of HN here. Nothing encourages discussion about headlines only as paywalled articles.