If - to paraphrase the other folks before me - it causes more annoyance than it does good, then the fact that one can spend more effort undoing its damage after the fact is, in fact, a bug rather than a feature.
But you're only hearing from the people who are annoyed enough to write a comment complaining about it. Many other users (such as myself) may be +1 or +0 on the functionality, in which case you can't conclude that "it causes more annoyance than it does good". You'd need to know user's preferences (if you're solving for that) or the value HN admin attributes to the feature vs. the value they attribute to the cost imposed on users (if you're solving for that)