Unfortunately a good part of HN is quite blind when it comes to facts about things that aren't of the liking of the community.
Some people seem to not be able to understand why K8s is widely used and not <whatever>, why the majority uses WhatsApp and not Signal or why the majority uses Twitter and not the <open source alternative of the year>. A not irrelevant amount of HN users will think, and many times literally say, that all these people are stupid and cannot understand how things really work.
In reality, everything happens for reasons. Sure, some people will just blindly follow trends but when you see most of the big websites that have plenty of money to do studies to find out if it works continue to do it, perhaps it means it's working for them? I hate those popups like most end-users but at the end of the day I'd never think most of the website owners who do this are dumb and do it to harm themselves but rather I tend to think they have hard data that shows this actually works pretty well.
I wish the community would realize how arrogant those "I don't have data on this / I don't understand why this is done therefore people who do this are just stupid" positions are.