My bar for "extremely significant" is much higher than it appears to be here. Apparently most events in the US/Iran involvement is "extremely significant" if we judge the votes on this site to offer guidance on how this rule is interpreted.

This forum was founded in 2007. The US was very much involved in Iraq and Afghanistan at that time. If the same bar for coverage was in place at the time, HN would have been flooded with US Military content the way it is now. So yeah, obviously the bar has moved lower for this particular matter and it's because the current community on the site wants it to. Likewise the "generated/AI-edited comments" guideline seems equally squishy to me. And despite a rule about being "curmudgeonly", I'm pretty sure 80% of this site's content is curmudgeonly rants.

IMO at this scale dang, tomhow, and other mods need to be much stricter. When HN was 1/10 the size a shaming comment would often set a poster in place. Now they just sneer back in another comment and post 20 other guideline breaking things.