Am I just really old, or is this web design atrocious...?

I know HN skews traditionalist anyway, but even here, a site this bad stands out.

I feel like normally we argue about user-invisible stuff like JS frameworks and analytics and tracking, but in this case it's a very in-your-face design meant to subvert all the common UX best practices in favor of something chic.

Does anyone like this? (Who is supposed to?) I can't tell anymore if I'm just old-fashioned and grumpy, and totally out of touch with modern preferences, or if this is just... universally bad.