A key problem is that these days a lot of techie/nerdy/geeky/hackery news has a potential political angle. Advances in cryptography, drones, medical matters, and many other things, increasingly touch on politics because they touch the wider world not just techie people and often do so in decisive ways.
Take face recognition and similar tech: all cool as the tech on its own, but there are scary implications that we see forming already so even if the original post is a purely technical & politics free look at a new development the comment threads resulting from it often won't be.
Conversely, political issues affect technical ones: free speech or the lack there of both has an impact on the use of current tech and drives ideas for future systems, so while seen as a political matter by some (a philosophical matter or both by others) there are valid interesting technical discussions that can be had relating to changes in those issues around the globe.
> In the old days
I think some of that is that in the old days the connection wasn't as “real” because the tech being discussed was not widely used, or was in fact still only theoretical. Now the tech is out there, and many are using it including many who have no specific technical bent because these things are becoming part of normal life. Once tech touches real life, it touches the sticky subjective messy aspects of real life: politics & morality. Also even when things are still theoretical, the developments are more open to the general public for better or worse because access to information (and, of course, misinformation) continues to become increasingly ubiquitous.
Take cryptocurrency as an example. A decade or so ago it was just a techie plaything really. People were talking about what wider impacts it could have, but it wasn't having them yet and it wasn't clear that it actually would in the end. It is easy to be dispassionate and unpolitical at that point. Now though some of those impacts have happened and continue to happen, and can affect lives in significant ways, so new stories on the subject can't help but attract some political discussion as well as going over the technical developments, or in fact are news stories about developments that are happening because of (to aid or circumvent) political concerns.
For another collection of subject matter that has seen a massive change in public and political interest, you only have to look at the last couple of years development in certain fields of biology.
There is little moderation here or elsewhere can do about this significant set of changes & movements. The mods and the community can nudge things in a certain direction, but they can't fully control them.