Good for them, but wow, what a terrible publication name. The first few times I clicked into a 404 Media article from HN, I immediately left because I thought the link was broken (404).
Plenty of tech news sites don’t have this problem and aren’t profitable. Feels like it’s not much of an actual problem. It seems like a problem at first in your story, but also consider after you left the first few times you eventually learned not to and you now know it’s a functioning site with that name. As a bonus it created a memorable story that you were compelled to post about.
Doing something poorly just for the novelty factor, requiring your users to find workarounds, is not quite the win you think it is.