You must be new here, hard work beating talent is an extremely popular topic.

People mostly reads these and see themselves as the superior side, if it is an article about hard work beating talent people see themselves as the hard worker, if it is an article about smart people doing X then of course the reader is on the smart side etc.

So an article on how most hard work is wasted since it wasn't well thought out would also be popular since there the reader would view his hard work as fruitful and only dumber people than them are wasting their time.

It is only when you start to poke hole in that self image people have built up that the downvotes starts to come. Most people aren't significantly smarter than their peer, most peoples hard work isn't well directed, but they don't want to hear those things.