I also regularly give a quick peek to the comments sections before reading the article in order to figure out whether I should bother reading.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't

So you're saying we need more questions

There is even a name for that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

It's the correct assumption to be made for the comments section to the article you quoted from.

I always look at the HN comments first to see if the article is worth reading, and probably other people do as well. HN loads quickly, doesn't have a paywall/cookie pop-up so it's just a better experience to look here first, and often the comments here are better value anyway.

The lack of context reltated to what the author wrote is a sin of omission -- because anyone reading a top-level comment that begins with a quote (like this) is, to a first approximation, going to imagine the commenter is responding to the position of the author.

That is not how quotation marks are designed to work.

The words offered up as a quote are meant to represent the views of the person being quoted. In this instance that is clearly not the case.

This is a perfect example of how quotes can be used to misrepresented a view.