> Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link?

Yes.

> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.

I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.

Now that you've said it, I think PG would have designed a better site if he didn't hide the underlines.

But also, it wouldn't get any worse if the same design was kept and the underlines were enabled. And it would improve the usability for first-time users, but the nature of HN is that those are always very few.

Wouldn't hurt if interactive elements didn't require me to zoom in order to interact with them on mobile.

I often forget you can click on the timestamp. In fact for years I didn't know how to flag comments because of this.