The alarming trend should be how even a slightly contrarian point of view is downvoted to oblivion, and that newer members of the community expect it to work that way.
Instead, you devoted 2/3 of your comment toward berating the OP as being responsible for your perception of HN's decline.
As for a race to the bottom, it's as simple as embracing and unleashing AI despite its lack of quality or ability to produce a product worth anything. But since it's a force multiplier and cheaper (for the user at least, all these AI companies are operating at a loss, see Goldman and JP Morgan's report on the matter), therefore it is "good" and we need to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps; which in this context, I'm not entirely sure what that means.