Is it technically correct for Hacker News to require login to upvote a story or comment? Mu; it's technically correct because it supports the ability to tie actions to actors, and that's correct because commenter history matters for the kind of forum Hacker News strives to be. Technical decisions are inextricable from what serves people.
And in that vein, the WEI team has been squelching comment channels because they've become low-value noise channels and dogpile opportunities. This isn't a design that the team in charge of it is choosing to do or not do by the number of angry GitHub posts they get, so that channel is now noise because they don't have someone to perch on the channel and filter novel information from me-too "Don't do" repeats.