I agree with your desire for what HN should be, and disagree with your assessment that the top voted comment doesn’t support it.

HN is the only forum I know of that has broadly grasped that most so-called “science” outside of the hard sciences and mathematics is complete garbage and driven by funding needs. The world is awash in non-knowledge. This is an extremely serious issue.

Building the skill to rapidly come to a preliminarily judgement of a headline is crucial.

There is plenty of garbage in hard science too. Start with

https://arxiv.org/archive/hep-th

The most reliable source of knowledge we have are in the science. This is further reinforced by technological development that validated the sciences, although at time the technology may precede the science.

> disagree with your assessment that the top voted comment doesn’t support it.

Did you read the paper or skim its abstract, figures, and conclusion? I'm not so sure that commenter did, or they may have cited this,

> Because we report smaller cardiomyocytes in cultured cells and in mice treated with semaglutide, it is tempting to speculate that semaglutide may induce cardiac atrophy. However, we do not observe any changes in recognized markers of atrophy such as Murf1 and Atrogin-1. Thus, we cannot be certain that semaglutide induces atrophy per se or if it does, it may occur via molecular pathways that have not been identified herein.

> Building the skill to rapidly come to a preliminarily judgement of a headline is crucial.

You can't judge this paper based on the popsci headline.

> most so-called “science” outside of the hard sciences and mathematics is complete garbage and driven by funding needs

Based on my reading of the figures and conclusion, I don't think you should call this paper garbage.