Yeah, that's an artifact of the livestream spanning many hours while the lifespan of HN submissions being measured in hours, so by the time the big moment happened the thread was already halfway down the page. I've rolled back the clock on the submission now to accommodate that.
I hear you about TC and will pay a bit more attention to that in the future, but really we judge this by article quality rather than site quality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), so your best bet is always to propose a significantly better, specific article. I'd have been happy to use the AT one instead, but it has other problems: its first half is a photo collection, which is ok in principle but raises other issues which I can explain if anyone cares; and its second half swerves sharply into a political direction that would likely act as flamebait here.