I agree with you largely, but I think part of the problem with flagging these sorts of topics every time and so early is that the flagging in itself is coming from a political stance -- that is, instead of attempting to engage with the non-political aspects of the story, people will just automatically flag it because they themselves see it as just political content.This story for example has a lot of meat we could discuss without needing to devolve into the politics of it. I think the topic of the pros and cons of privatizing government services can lead to some interesting discussion.

My quip about the LLM stuff is me venting my frustration a bit about how HN relatively often will end up with multiple articles from different sources about the same little bit of tech news, and the comment threads will all look largely the same, with some flavour of "I like this because of XYZ" or "I don't like this because of XYZ". Plenty of comment threads on more HN-relevant topics turn into perhaps not flaming cesspools, but pits of unoriginal and uninteresting banality.

And I understand the moderation aspect of it, I've moderated on large public forums before, and I have nothing but the utmost respect and understanding for dang and HN's position on this topic, but in my experience when you have so much pressure to discuss a topic that affects so many people, even if mostly off-topic, it can be a good idea to provide some relief valve. Back when I was doing forum moderation, we sometimes ran "Unfinished Business" threads (named after the BSG episode of the same name where the crew got to basically spar against each other in a boxing ring, disregarding rank, to work out interpersonal frustrations.) We still moderated the thread for things like people posting illegal or spammy shit, or doxxing others, but otherwise allowed the discussions and tempers to run as they would for the most part.

Maybe something like a once-a-month thread that is allowed to get a little nastier to provide some avenue to discuss these topics would not be a terrible idea. One could even make it so that at the end of the day, the thread is erased along with all the comments and none of the upvotes/downvotes are retained. For me personally, I would also much rather have a 'cesspool discussion' on HN rather than on random news sites simply because I can expect that even when the discussion devolves from HN's relatively high standard, it will still exceed the quality of discussion I could be having in most other places.