You should be pragmatic about pragmatics.
The comment was an attempt to affect other people. If you produce the wrong effects, your language is wrong.
If everyone agrees that it's a question, it's a question. If things that weren't questions a year ago are questions now, then the language changed. But it doesn't take a lot of people wrongly interpreting something as a question to produce unwanted answers, so maybe they are wrong. And language fragmentation is worth fighting.
Having slept on it, I think I can offer a more fine-grained explanation for what I think is going on.
There are implicit and explicit speech acts. You can implicitly or explicitly threaten someone, or compliment someone, or express romantic interest in someone. There are some speech acts which you cannot, or as a matter of policy should not, carry out implicitly. As extreme examples, you cannot implicitly extend someone power of attorney, and you should not interpret someone's implicit expressions of interest in being erotically asphyxiated as an invitation...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.