Highly doubt that. It’s very hard to actually read scientific papers when you are not actively doing research.
You can’t just read a research paper in isolation. It’s next to useless. You need to understand its context, where it stands with regard to its sources and what it brings which is actually new and valuable. It’s nearly impossible to do properly if you are not fully immersed in a research subject.
I don’t even know how you would scheme introduction and sources to filter articles which are immediately obviously useless without being immersed in a field.
I guess you can obviously go though lists of papers which have be deemed worthwhile by someone else or got prices. That solves the filtering issue but then nearly every time you will be better served reading a text book presenting the ideas in said papers.
I fully expect the HN readership to contain a significant amount of students and actual researchers which explain why you encounter people reading papers but these people aside I would be surprised if the habit is common.