I'm happy for this founder's success and wish them the best. However, there are no "learnings" in this article at all. It's just a promotional piece from Google for this program. It even ends with a CTA to join the program.
I think this highlights the redditization of HN. You have tons of people upvoting on title alone not care about the content one bit. I’m not really sure there is a fix once a site gets big enough that it’s starts attracting people outside its original niche.