First of all, it's about an entrepreneur traveling to the US for a startup, which is directly relevant to a significant proportion of YCombinator founders themselves.
Beyond its direct relevance to the core founding audience of HN, it is not clickbait or wantonly inflammatory, and is clearly of interest to many based on the comment activity and votes.
Yes
> There's little-to-no discussion about the implications on tech, based on my reading of the comments.
You commented 3 hours in on a topic that was flagged for hours. How much discussion did you expect period?
The implications are obvious: other countries's businesses will be terrified reading this and refuse to enter the country. No one wants their liasons arrested by a foreign country. I can imagine many businesses in he EU marking the US as a no-fly zone over this story