alt Hacker NewsFlags are issued by regular users like us though. What do you expect a moderator to do, except maybe manually intervene to "un dead" something if it seems like a case of overly biased flagging? That's assuming mods have the ability to do that (I've always assumed that they do).
Flagging content should be a privilege that comes at a certain level of trust, and the privilege should be revoked by moderators for people that use flags to further an agenda.
Trust in forum users can be measured by various metrics - The Discourse forum software is a good example of how to do this: https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-t...