The downvoted comments on that post are because they're complaining about the submission and are therefore nonconstructive. In your case, bringing up the Gemini controversy in that post is extremely off-topic.

If you don't like a HN submission, don't read it. If it breaks the rules, flag it.

In hindsight I think the post was overly negative, even though I am no Gemma fan. People are downvoting just because of that.

Now, what's a little odd to me is that there was so much interest positive interest from HNers? People submit really good new models/finetunes all the time, but there's usually no interest in them, at least not unless I bring them up in tangentially related comment sections.

HN is usually read frequently by googlers and anything critical about Google's products usually gets downvoted strangely. It could possibly be by some googlers reading the comments or a typical HN bot somewhere.