I think there's two things I'd point to here -
The first is that, by the standards of the world at large, this is a relatively homogeneous community. It is still a wildly diverse community, that's one of the things that makes it valuable, but in the same way that psychology has a WEIRD[1] problem, Hacker News is homogeneous - we're more likely, as a community, to not include a viewpoint sampled at random from humanity than to include it.
That points towards the second, which is that there's a tendency within this group where, when a news article comes up or a law is proposed or an academic study is posted in which some factor of human life is discussed ("X% of people experience food scarcity", "Y state bill would bar employers from Z", "B in C people are genetic carriers for Q"), to discuss it from our own viewpoint - "My cousin who experienced food scarcity was a klepto," "my employer tried to call me off hours and I didn't answer," "my cousin died from Q." This is both intensely human and often fairly useless here, because of point one above. I am a straight white male who grew up in a house whose affluence varied but never dropped below sustenance who's worked in tech my entire life. I have parts of myself that are genuinely different, where I feel I can genuinely provide new information to the group (I've had heart surgery, for instance), but by and large, if I share my experience with this group, it's to commiserate with colleagues. I am part of this community; things which seem strange to me are more likely than not to be outside this broader community's lived experiences as well.
So my critique here, broadly, is that we as a professed group of hackers - as a group of people who've self-labeled as curious - have a bad tendency to read things that indicate an experience of life that we haven't or don't have (in this case, that someone could be unable to deny their employer after-hours comms) and focus on our own experiences, rather than recognizing that we're being provided an opportunity to expand our understanding of the possible states of the world or the possibilities of being for people in this world.
It's understandable and deeply human that we would do so - we're social creatures, and community building is in part an act of expressing and validating commonality - but for a group whose self-identity is curiosity, to respond to evidence of someone else's lived experience by reiterating our own lived experience when that experience is likely to be within that of the broader group present is... well, it just takes up space.
(By the way, this is the point in the post where I'm going to nod towards my neurodivergent brethren: when I say below "we," if the point I'm making doesn't apply to you, understand that if you were in a room with you, me, and 10 wolves, and I said "there's too many wolves in this room," and you responded "well I'm not a wolf," I would agree with you and that wouldn't change my point.)
We are, broadly, a privileged group. Broadly, the people on this forum have remarkable market power. Broadly, the people on this forum are wealthy. Broadly, the people on this forum are educated. If, when you comment on a thread, you are expressing a part of your lived experience that broadly coincides with the lived experience of the median person on this forum, _you are not adding to the discussion._ You're not expanding the discussion. You're not helping people learn. You're not, yourself, learning. If you read something on this forum and think, "weird, that's not how I experience the world," think to yourself "Am I adding to this discussion by saying that?"
1. https://oecs.mit.edu/pub/spow8trw/release/1