“This article is not meant to be a literary nor an exhaustive topical critique of the novels, which I am cannot fully do, because simply, I did not read the original novels. ”
Because the article is interesting and insightful.
The full paragraph you quote starts with:
"In this article, I try to explain in detail where Frank Herbert got his names, concepts, and words from."
I'm not sure that "but you didn't read the whole book/series!" qualifies as a reasonable critique of someone who's just giving some (AFAICT straight-forward) etymological background on a few names and concepts...
Also, HN is not some high arbiter of taste. It's just a voting-based algorithm, and the population of voters isn't that large. A re-statement of your question might be: "so why did 60 random internet people click on this at around the same time?", and the answer might be "because there were 60 people who like dune, happened to be on hn around the time this was posted, and don't know much about islam/arabic" :)
On a tangential note, your post reminded me that I should go read "How to talk about books you haven't read", at least for the peace of mind, if not anything else.
Why is this highly rated on HN then?!