I think the reason why cousin_it's comment is upvoted so much is that a lot of people (including me) weren't really aware of S-risks or how bad they could be. It's one thing to just make a throwaway line that S-risks could be worse, but it's another thing entirely to put together a convincing argument.

Similar ideas have been in other articles, but they've framed it in terms of energy-efficiency while defining weird words such as computronium or the two-envelopes problem, which make it much less clear. I don't think I saw the links for either of those articles before, but if I had, I probably wouldn't have read them.

I also think that the title helps as well. S-risks is a catchy name, especially if you already know x-risks. I know that this term has been used before, but it wasn't used in the title. Further, while being quite a good article, you can read the summary, introduction and conclusion without encountering the idea that the author believes that s-risks are much greater than x-risks, as opposed to being just yet another risk to worry about.

I think there's definitely an important lesson to be drawn here. I wonder how many other articles have gotten close to an important truth, but just failed to hit it out fo the park for some reason or another.