Your comment is a perfect example of why the wheel gets reinvented so often.
Part of it is preference, sort of. A specific crowd of people, many of who visit HN, are used to looking at monospaced fonts. So, they have effectively been trained to be able to deal with it more.
That still doesn't mean that, even for them, the text done with best practices wouldn't be easier to read.
Finally, as you might have noticed I also explicitly mentioned writing for a broader audience. Because people that are not working with code, terminals, etc all are not used to monospaced fonts.
Part of it is preference, sort of. A specific crowd of people, many of who visit HN, are used to looking at monospaced fonts. So, they have effectively been trained to be able to deal with it more.
That still doesn't mean that, even for them, the text done with best practices wouldn't be easier to read.
Finally, as you might have noticed I also explicitly mentioned writing for a broader audience. Because people that are not working with code, terminals, etc all are not used to monospaced fonts.