I admit to distrust.
I distrust anyone who tries to downplay privacy as important.
I distrust anyone who tries to brand a genuine privacy upgrade as "hype"
And, frankly, signing in (with AppleID or not) doesn't prove a thing one way or another. The OP could be simply harvesting email addresses and selling them off later[+]. (S)he could be upset that HME and SIWA are a threat to that business. Far-fetched ? Sure. More far-fetched than an adult throwing the tantrum on the website ? Not so sure...
Or another option along the same lines. Perhaps OP has another more-public site that (s)he doesn't want to take this stand on for PR reasons, so they're doing it here, and getting "awareness" out there by submitting to places like HN. In that case, sure, there'd be no email abuse on the <don't care about> site...
There's a few other options that are possible. None of these get around the basic premise that privacy on the net is important (at least to me, YMMV) and I don't trust those who decry it.
[+] Tesla does this, for example. All of a sudden, a couple of years after buying power walls, I'm getting emails to Tesla@<my-domain> and texts containing Tesla@<my-domain> to my phone number (which I usually obscure using google-voice) asking if they can give me mortgage offers (for example). Tesla sold my details when I stopped buying expensive stuff from them - this is why I set up a catch-all address, and used <company>@<my-domain> whenever I signed up for stuff. Now I use HME.