There are a lump of people who appear excited in general, sure, but the people who appear to have know-how in the area are more subdued and questioning, even then. There are a fair few comments calling it garbage.
Many people seem to have called it.
This is no different for literally every HN post.
- You can't trust scientific press releases at face value.
- You definitely can't trust science reporting in media, or any kind of reporting for that fact (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect).
- You can't trust companies not to oversell themselves, in particular startups like this, you never take them at face value.
People are much less cynical when a company is open about what it's going to do and how, talking science and engineering instead of marketing & PR bullshit.
In this particular case I think the criticism was warranted, even if you try to only consider what was known at the time. "We are a new startup led by an inexperienced yougester and we have a product that does everything better and cheaper than the industry standard but we won't peer review" seems like a huge red flag. The Forbes fluff piece with strange and rather dubious claims regarding the level of skills of the founder adds a second layer of redflagging on top of that.
In hindsight it seems like a way to keep the government away by trying to bribe people in it.