> an article like this getting this high in hacker news is just very wild to me
It might be because it's a "You should host web fonts from Google Fonts yourself" in disguise. The technical "How to" is almost not the important part here :-)
It may give some pause to web devs who hotlink to google here on HN without much thoughts and make them consider doing it differently next time.
I suspect many people upvoting it are doing it for this. Maybe upvotes here might actually mean "Please host Google Fonts yourself".
I thought HN automatically stripped "How To" from the titles, which would have made this one "Self-host a web font from GF"
It strips out "Why" for sure, I don't know about how to
I think you can revert by editing your submission afterwards.