The people on HN have changed. It used to be founders and people doing things. Founders of some now huge companies were on HN. Interesting and well known hackers too. Now it's SWEs who work in big tech, hate their jobs and are afraid of being laid off who just parrot politically expedient current talking points. x.com is more interesting these days, even for tech.
Tech has changed, back in the early 2000s it really felt very creative, the growing big companies were inventing new things and defining the web. They were also much smaller, more idealistic and in their "youthful vigor" stage.
These days, most people's experience at a big tech company is a political dystopia where everyone is optimizing for their promo packet.
That's going to get you 2 different audiences.
Back in 2000s tech was about websites to share "I can has cheezeburger" photos and now we're literally in the middle of technological revolution that seemed like scifi less than 10 years ago. Not only AI, but biotech, space, fusion, robitics, even gussian splats. Solo software engineer can't create on of these now. But there's so much more invention of genuinely new, exciting new things going on that we can be involved with.
Yes, big corps suck. Always have, always existed, 20 and 40 years ago. Startups of 20 years ago have become big corps of today; now, new ones are in this "youthuful vigor" stage.
But you just hit the nail on the head: "Solo software engineer can't create on of these now".
The current boom in AI and the cloud/social media boom in the recent decade have required ungodly amounts of capital for their resident companies to get off the ground. It's no longer a creative endeavour that basement hackers can participate in. In many ways it is toxic to the original nerd/hacker ethos by shutting out newcomers to the field and increasing wealth inequality, hence the hostility you now see on HN.
The low hanging fruit is definitely gone but there's got to be some interesting problems...
There's been a massive shift in the industry. It's gone from "me and a couple dudes are working on this thing that'll help people live a better life", to "let's lie about what our product can do to reach unicorn status then cash out before anyone notices" and "let's make something that makes people feel dissatisfied with life and keeps them addicted and sells surveillance data to private militaries and governments to threaten our critics."
The good vibes and optimism have left the industry.
It would just be nice if people created good vibes. X is a chaotic mess but there's at least pockets of good vibes. PG still posts over there, as do DHH, Sama, and a bunch of other notable people and people builder things. Here it's been AI, React and political slop for years.
Most founder nowadays are not engineers or people who really can create anything, but well connected business idiots.