Comment by _dain_

When this gets posted on HN, most of the comments are about how it's more common for answerers to incorrectly suggest that it's an XY problem, when it really isn't.

I think this is because most HN commenters are pretty good at programming already. Chances are, they're asking about more esoteric issues, and have considered the problem in detail before writing the question. So when someone suggests the question is an XY-question, it's probably not.

But the bulk of people asking programming questions are not very skilled. They're newbies. They have weakly developed mental models and taxonomies, they don't have much experience of independent debugging, they don't know how to effectively read documentation, and they haven't developed the meta-cognition needed to recognize that a strategy is probably unsound. And they don't have experience with "technical forum culture" (e.g. give a minimum reproducible example, or even basic things like how to format code properly). Many of them are literally kids or teenagers asking about homework problems, so on top of the lack of programming maturity, there's a lack of everything-maturity.

That big latter group is where most of the XY problems are coming from. I can tell you from answering lots of questions on beginner-friendly forums, 95% of the time someone says "this is an XY problem", they are right.