Those are good questions, but you seem to be under the impression that HN didn't use to be intensively moderated. HN was always intensively moderated, curated, or whatever one calls it. That's why you can write:

The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times.

It was PG who made it false. He poured countless hours into managing the site and writing code to manage it.

That model hasn't changed. It's more transparent now, because users asked for it to be. Transparency has the side-effect of making it seem to some people like we've fundamentally altered HN when it doesn't work like they assumed it did.