Personally I think it's dilluted the hackers from other sites (like me). But your theory sounds much stronger. A lot of new sites and ideas are not pay to win, they are buy to belong. Crypto, 3D printers, gaming forums, PC hardware forums, AI. These communities manifest free marketing and updates in products to convince you they're good for you to buy them.
I found HN great for some things but you did click this link too. This is a celebrity gossip thread and you joined. I found John walkers site from here didn't know about it. https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
'Real hackers' are live on git, maybe twitch. Chill out and listen to what your general peer has to say here and imagine non hackers discussing it. Nobody outside here cares about this drama except Twitter bots. Check out Google trends. https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily?geo=...
Not to mention, on the AI Paint thread, there was this heavily upvoted guy saying its servers are paid for by the stock market and tech bubble like some kind of conspiracy theorist, completely ignoring that it's run locally.
I don't know why I keep coming here. I guess it's because I'm addicted. At least on Reddit you could leave subreddits and block people when they get too incomprehensible from your own perspective.
But I have had to cut myself off from a given community because my relationship became unhealthy with it many times. I get that.
New theory, HN is a honey pot for dumb people that Y Combinator studies how to make money from.
Previous theory it was a Alzheimer's style "Fake bus stop" used to round up imposter hackers and keep them contained while the real Hackers did stuff.