Anything that could put Musk or Trump in a negative light is immediately flagged here. Discussions about how Grok went crazy the other day was also buried.
If you want to know how big tech is influencing the world, HN is no longer the place to look. It's too easy to manipulate.
Anything that triggers the flamewar detector gets down-weighted automatically. Those two trigger discussion full of fast poorly thought out replies and often way more comments than story upvotes, so stories involving them often trip that detector. On top of that, the discussion is usually tiresome and not very interesting, so people who would rather see more interesting things on the front page are more likely to flag it. It's not some conspiracy.
Even looking around the thread there's evidence that lots of other people can't even have the kind of meta-level discussion you're looking for without descending into the ideological-battle thing.