Sorry but when someone describes what they are doing is wrong, maybe they need to hear that. I don't really care about being nice at all costs, because the truth sometimes hurts. If they change one little thing and the entire layout breaks, that says quite a lot about the situation, and that together with their insistence to do everything like they did 20 years ago just adds up to someone needing to hear the truth. They are doing things very wrong. And this also isn't the place to delve deeply into the root of their problems, as they obviously are not really interested in learning or changing - so if you're offended by the truth, well that's not really my problem.
Your comment didn't contain any information. It was just mean. When you do that, you make HN a nastier place.
These effects are always greater than the person adding the poison imagines they are—and worse, they compound over time. That path leads to the destruction of the forum as the most desirable users gradually get disillusioned and leave, and the proportion of nastiness grows among those who remain. The idea of HN has always been to try to stave that outcome off for as long as we can:
"Someone needs to hear the truth" is not an argument that carries much water because (1) it's what every internet asshole says, and (2) if you present the truth in a nasty way, you actually discredit the truth by giving neutral readers a reason to reject it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). In the future, if you have some truth to share, doing so respectfully will help protect the forum and will get the information across to more people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html