There's room for lots of kinds of website. I think a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity has a right to exist, among others; and if HN is to be that, it has to be preserved actively, since the default forces all point the other way. User flags are part of how HN preserves itself. Yes, there are exceptions, but those need to be infrequent and have some unusual quality that raises them out of the category of latest outrage.
The supply of outrages outweighs the capacity of this site to accommodate them. Rather than calling that disgusting and despicable (as happened a lot today), it would be better to find a different kind of site that can accommodate them, or perhaps even to start one.