But it's not unusual for him to wade into conversations like this. What he's objecting to is an instance of a pattern that he has consistently been objecting to over the the last 9 months or so: commenters extrapolating the public policy intentions of organizations based on reporting about the behavior of those organizations. There's a term for that kind of reasoning: fundamental attribution error.
Given a couple minutes with the HN search bar, you can quickly find several other recent places where Dan has raised the same objections with respect to other companies.
I think "not attributing unproven intentionality to organizations" is a pretty good norm for HN to adopt.
That doesn't mean you can't make the argument that Airbnb is having a toxic effect on particular cities! It just means you can't make the lazy emotional appeal that Airbnb is run by people who don't care about toxicity.
I am recounting a year of direct personal experience, no reporting is involved.