Don't let these people fixated on Doherty Thresholds give you flack you have delivered on spec let the pedantic etymologists eschew obfuscation around how to define brutalism - you didnt invent the word but could quote from Cameron [1] "This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction."
By the way, aesthetics are a red herring -- the real brutality here is seeing HN as a naked text headline feed with no signal given on votes, comments, source, even date !!! My bet is it unnerves people who are used to clicking on a fuzzy measure of these things alone so deciding without them is too far out of a comfort zone. It provokes a visceral dread and gets taken out on response times, api calls, and vocabulary.
Stay Brutal! It Rocks !