There was a period I can recall, maybe 2010 to 2020 most prominently, when a subset of HN readers strongly preferred the mobile Wikipedia site, even on desktop, and would always use ".m" linking to Wikipedia articles in comments threads. This also seemed to happen in reddit threads during that decade.

I sort of remember some of the older MediaWiki desktop themes looking worse than the mobile theme, but it was never enough for me personally to try always using the mobile site at the time. I do still strongly prefer old.reddit.com... For as long as that portal continues to exist.

Yeah, in the olden days, there was no max-width for desktop wikipedia, so the readability was not good.