Kind of feel like saying that HN didn't/did love those projects is a bit too black and white. Many of those submissions do have a lot of dismissive comments, but lots of them also have a lot of comments praising the project one or another way, explicitly or implicitly. Some of the highlighted comments also aren't even the top 3 comments, yet they're used as indicative of what the HN community loves or not.

But I guess that isn't as interesting to people today, nuance seems to be something people try to avoid, rather than seek out.