Is the guilty pleasure here one that you feel the satisfaction/enjoyment/reward is one that your younger self would disdain?
It's okay to evolve your thinking on this. Some of my younger ideas were conclusively proven wrong, payed for by the consequences of my actions and all that. Younger me clearly got a few things wrong, I feel like I need to re-examine my preconceptions often.
Young Me, a voracious reader, was defeated several times by the LOTR books. To this day, I doubt I could force myself to read dozens of pages of Tom Bombadil singing about trees.
Also Neil Stephenson, come to think of it. I believe that I've absorbed enough of Snow Crash and Diamond Age via nerd culture to provide summaries of both but oof, I couldn't finish either of them.
Or one could conclude that the bots were posting at a time of day intending you as the reading target. As long as they post things that you are inclined to agree with, you'll feel positive reinforcement about an issue regardless of the actual popularity or even viability.
In a terrible mixup, it was revealed that it was actually the first words of the first Czech president, after the envelope was opened to reveal the word "máma".
I hate to break it to you OP, but tech news sites are not reliable. This is prima-facie evidence that you yourself can see. Please understand that you need to lower your trust levels of these sources as a result.
They don't care that they're wrong and no one will hold them to account.