>but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms

They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.

>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.

Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.

I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.

>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.

The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.

>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.

Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.