The Ask HN thread on this is now flagged/not showing up. Didn’t think HN was censoring this kind of stuff.
What would be surprising, though, is if this site didn't see through the flags and allowed the removal of completely legitimate discussion because it upsets some.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I'm trying to figure out what happened (I don't keep track of these things while I'm asleep), but having taken a quick look so far I can tell you for sure that the flags were from legit, longstanding, entirely boring HN users. (Edit: I did not mean to insult those HN users. I meant that if people saw the list of usernames, they'd find it boring because there would be nothing sinister in it.)