This sort of cavalier attitude is going to get them in trouble; I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't already gotten them into trouble. Hack Club has enough money that they can easily be a worthwhile target if any of their decisions turns out badly.
I'm going to be a bit oblique here because I don't want HC to take this out on my child, but at one of the HC events, the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening. Another situation led to our child being "ditched" in a foreign city and unsure how to get ahold of anyone on the ground to help.
Hack Club is a great idea, and I'm glad it exists, but I do think that the way it is currently organized is going to end badly.
I addressed the post itself in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45921428&), so I'll skip that part.
I would really like to know more about these incidents at HC events. We have a lot of very complex tradeoffs within hack club involving security/privacy/safety for exactly the reasons you identified (ie, giving teenagers a very high level of agency/responsibility in running programs). However, staff try to be extremely conscious of these tradeoffs and highly attentive to the realistic risk vectors that come about in our operations.
No teenager will ever (ever!) have anything 'taken out' on them by myself or anyone else that works here. Any time things go wrong or almost go wrong, we just want to know so we can manage that risk in the future. If you are willing to share, please reach out at cwalker@hackclub.com