It's interesting how comments tend to be held to much higher standards on HN than the submissions themselves. I wonder if that's purely because there's no downvote button for submissions or if there are other reasons.
Don't know if you've ever tried to submit links here, but it's kind of random whether your submission gets to the front page or not. I believe the click-baitniness of the title has a lot to do with "success" there. You can see a similar effect on YouTube, a lot of videos have really click-baity titles even if the video itself is high quality.
100% it's the click-baity aspects of the title. Just like reddit, or anywhere, there's enough people who see the title and upvote without reading it, if the title is appealing enough.
Source: I submitted an article with a direct quote from the abstract as the title. It gained a lot of interest before the title was changed to word salad of the original. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28400659