I think this is a BAD thing for the health of the comment section. An even worse outcome is people commenting based on the headline and maybe a blurb only. How is that supposed to promote a good community?
If you want paywalled articles being the bulk of the posts on hacker news that garner discussions then we might as well just go ahead and paywall this site.. because it's slowly becoming a paywalled tech discussion site.. just with more steps.
It probably tells that you also hit the paywall. Those who downvoted probably didn't, perhaps because their setup doesn't trigger it by default, or because they searched by themselves how to avoid it.
I personally didn't see any paywall when accessing the site directly (ie, without a VPN).