alt Hacker NewsJS was never really obfuscated - it wasn't the goal of minification. Minifiers especially struggle with ES6 classes/etc, outputting code that is almost human readable.
Proper obfuscation libraries exist, typically at the cost of a pretty notable amount of performance that I'd wager most are not willing to sacrifice
And like even the best of client-side DRM, everything can be reverse engineered. All the code has been downloaded to the user's machine. It's one of the (IMO terrible) excuses for the SaaSification of all software
minification was originally about sending less bytes on the wire and saving a bit of performance. Somewhere along the road people started misusing this for security, because JS evolved from "a few snippets of code to make my site more interactive" to SPAs