I think the front page is increasingly dominated by programming and web-adjacent business, I wish people took some more interest in other aspects of business and technology.
For political content I'll grant a lot of stuff about cancel culture and dog pills get posted to new but it gets flagged before it makes it to the talk. My "reading between the lines" is that the people who post that stuff are offended (and think it is political) that anybody is talking about any subject other than cancel culture and dog pills for COVID-19.
For stanning do you mean Elon Musk? It's true that Musk gets talked about a lot on HN but he is not universally popular.
In terms of people doing marketing I do see two trends. (1) There is always somebody asking why their posts are getting automatically rejected when they post links to the same blog over-and-over again with the same account. They are always mystified at the idea that they should try to be a participant on the site that behaves like the other participants on the site (like link to somebody else's blog) (2) There are some firms that do the better form of content marketing (say pinecone.io) that post a lot of articles, some of which are high quality, some of which are filler. Some of those front page frequently.