Because people found that it has something insightful to add to the conversation? Even as a wrong opinion to be corrected with their comments.

Now why does your content-free comment deserves to be here?

The flood of new users refuse to downvote anything.

Until your karma count goes above a certain amount, the downvote function is disabled. So it could be the case that these new users are simply unable to downvote, not that they refuse to do so.