The modern western world loves Safety(TM). This isn't a bad thing. Obviously we don't want people getting killed in industrial accidents all the time. However, as a side effect any platform (HN, Reddit, Twitter, whatever) which quantifies people's opinions is going to tend toward shallow pearl clutching when it comes to topics like this. People realize that when they make some shallow (shallow has the nice side effect of giving you a wide potential audience) comments about GoodThings(TM) like Safety(TM) their virtue score goes up.
So every time some topic comes up, no matter how mundane or niche it is, there will inevitably be tons of people tripping over each other to score cheap virtue points by going after obvious trad-offs. "What about safety", "what about the poors", people ask questions like that even though they already know and don't care about the answer because their lizard brain knows that when they do that the number in the top right corner gets bigger.
So every time some topic comes up, no matter how mundane or niche it is, there will inevitably be tons of people tripping over each other to score cheap virtue points by going after obvious trad-offs. "What about safety", "what about the poors", people ask questions like that even though they already know and don't care about the answer because their lizard brain knows that when they do that the number in the top right corner gets bigger.
That's just how modern gamified social media is.