If they had a banner saying "Trump 2024" or "The AZOV Battalion are Nazis" I might not agree with them, but at least they are taking some personal risk of cancellation.
So if it's empty, so is commenting on HN, I'd extrapolate. Otherwise, it's gotten the attention of the sort of people who comment on HN, and that's something.
1. These political threads always bring out the most ideologically strident folk
2. Developer time/experience is impacted by these changes.
While I personally think these banners are fine and good to raise awareness, I do agree that there's a moral grandstanding element as well. I'm often puzzled why it's so controversial a belief to have. I don't see why folks are so annoyed at these banners though because I've been annoyed for years and years at crappy ASCII/figlet drawings that libraries/apps output that are garbled in my terminal's width/encoding and yet people still add those.
But mostly I'm wondering why it matters if they're taking a personal risk or not. How is that relevant to anything?