It feels so much against the spirit of the site as well. "Ignore the actual research in favour of my N=1 preference, and don't worry your users will jump through various non-obvious UX hoops to get the same behaviour that could have been default."
I felt it was pretty fitting for HN to find a comment like this at the top. I'll have to admit it's also fitting to find one like yours below it. That it's the most discussed argument is the cherry on top. The comment section feels like a carousel for nearly a decade now.
Actually, you are doing the exact thing you criticize. You are suggesting to prescribe your personal preference to users, while they argued for not doing so and letting the user choose, while leaving it unspecified, how the user is supposed to make that choice of viewport/content width.
I much more sympathize with them tbh. Let browser makers figure out how to give the easy to use controls to users. Let them add some override for the number of columns and columns max width and gap and so on. Or let extensions handle that. Whatever. But don't rely on each site prescribing how I have to read it.
What am I doing exactly? I'm saying to take UX studies more seriously than anecdotal preference, and to recognise that very few people are going to manually resize their viewport to navigate your website.
