There's a huge amount of moderation going on about repetitive LLM submissions. The fact that you're not seeing it is a separate issue.
HN's frontpage is a composite of the preferences of thousands (if not millions) of people. One consequence is that it doesn't match anyone's preferences precisely (including mine). No one ever feels like their favorite topics are sufficiently represented, and everyone always feels like their less-favorite topics are overrepresented.
If you think about this for a bit, it'll probably become clear that can't possibly be true and have the HN front page look they way it usually does. Beside the many mod comments that talk about other kinds of story moderation. But it's a rare case of a thing you can totally derive from first principles/minimal observation!
My strong suspicion is that mods generally either operate programmatically (that is, adjust site and other weights to favour or deprecate specific sources or stories, tweak flamewar detectors, voting-ring detectors, etc.), follow up on complaints emailed to them, and/or adjust member-based actions (voting, flags, vouches), etc.
That leverages their power far more than individually policing stories, though keeping an eye on the 30-odd stories which are on the front page at any time probably fits in somewhere as well.
I still don't understand your point, sorry. What is the thing I'm supposed to be making up? You said 'dang just unflags things'. This isn't accurate, that's all.
He has said so himself and there are plenty of articles that by your logic would have been flagged. You're the one with the burden of proof of a claim, not me.
I think you must have misunderstood something. You can email hn@ycombinator.com and make the case some article or another does not belong on the front page (not original source, a dupe, linkbait, offtopic, whatever). If you're right, that article will be downranked, sometimes right off the front page. People do this all the time. It's the inverse of emailing to make the case something is misflagged.
What is true is that almost all [flagged] and [flagged][dead] is from user flags. But that doesn't mean that the only story moderation by moderators is just unflagging.
I would love to see more stimulating conversation about a variety of topics here[1] but these things don't seem to gain traction. Why is that?
[0] https://imgflip.com/i/9o2a9r
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=Teever