The 404 Media version of this story was submitted by 4 different people so there is sufficient interest in it, but 404 Media is a shadowbanned domain.
Granted, everyone (including The Verge) has sporadic paywalls nowadays so that may need to be evaluated.
Banning journalism domains which use pay walls for some articles would make sense if consistent.
I can imagine no good reason to hide from a user a submission was rejected because the domain used pay walls for some articles.
Hacker News posts don't get automatically killed due to too many people submitting the same one.