It's not Hacker News. It's Musk fans on HN. The article is flagged (anyone can do it) but not dead. My reasonable comment elsewhere in this thread was also flagged by Musk fans but it's still alive.
It’s not, but they could fix the issue by raising the flagging threshold for Musk-related posts.
There is. But seems like it’s only for [dead], not [flagged].
But posts about the mass flagging also get deleted, so anyone who isn't checking the 'active' page has no idea about it all.
The mods will just gaslight you as well about the entire thing. I know for some unknown reason it’s considered bad form to have anything other than a high opinion of the job they do but I think they do a bad job. I’m not saying it’s not a hard job or anything, I just think they are actively bad at it.