HN ia is read by experts in any number of fields from biotech, to medicine, physics, farming, or nearly anything else. If there are 150 people programming in Zig, most of them likely read HN. The more niche the tech, I think the higher the odds the users are here. But to your point, I don't know why some of these things rise to the front page in the first place.
My current frustration is links to blog posts. I'm starting to ask myself "who is this person and why should I care about their opinion?" It's one thing to link research, or even a book, but a few of the blogs lately.... The topic sounds interesting, but the content sometimes makes me realize it's just some dudes blog and not professional advice. I'd kinda like some kind of (opinion) tag on those.