It's hard for me to read '"Regulations bad" is a pretty common platitude around here but you've stated your main thesis, here, without a hint of support to back it.' as anything more than that.
If you consider that part of a "culture war", then it seems that term has lost all meaning. Might as well just accuse me of being "woke" and get it over with.
There's still a strong libertarian streak in HN posters, in a variety of ways.
However, there are also (mostly) different posters who have more vocally shifted the site's Overton window to the left.
These days, I find it fairly common to, for instance, make a comment that points out the very obvious problems the Republican Party has created in recent years, get downvoted to -3, and then upvoted to +5 (or vice versa), all within a few hours. This would suggest that there are contingents of posters (or at least voters!) in both camps.