alt Hacker News> "I don't like what the population is choosing to use their brand-new Freedom for"
I think this is a totally valid conclusion, especially for someone growing out of Randianism. It's yet another Chesterton's Fence, or someone discovering that the safety rails were there for good reasons.
I'm not sure how we got from the massive international overreach of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg to "sports gambling is now endemic and everyone has trading-themed gambling apps in their pocket". It seems like gambling is too cancerous: you can't just have a little gambling in a corner somewhere, it will take over everything if allowed to exist.
If people making bad choices is a deal-breaker for someone, then I think they might not have been a very good libertarian/randian in the first place.
Also, my point against tfa was less "the author holds a bad opinion" and more "the piece claims to talk about one thing, but actually talks about a completely different thing, drawing bad conclusions as a result."