What's proposed in the question is a good, easy, actionable improvement that would make an immediate positive difference and is worth doing.

It can be done, and should be done (and probably should have been done 2 years ago when it was first proposed).

It should be rolled out as soon as possible.

We can, did, and probably will continue to spend large amounts of time discussing other, deeper, more fundamental improvements to the mechanisms around HNQ. That is important and needs doing. It is not a reason to not act on good, simple, quick improvements that will have an immediate positive effect.

If someone is bleeding heavily from the arm, you can and should spend time talking about why they're bleeding, how to prevent similar such bleeding, what the best bandaging technique is, etc etc. But that's not a good reason to dither and delay on treating the immediate symptom, putting bandaging the bleeding arm.

We should continue to discuss things like how to give sites more control over their HNQs, but that's not a good reason to delay taking a simple, easy to spec, easy to schedule and easy to implement action that will clearly reduce how often curious-looking but low-quality questions get stuck in the HNQ list because they're (often inadvertently) clickbait-y to people who don't know the topic.

What's proposed in the question is a good, easy, actionable improvement that would make an immediate positive difference and is worth doing.

It can be done, and should be done (and probably should have been done 2 years ago when it was first proposed).

It should be rolled out as soon as possible.

Of course it's one improvement among many needed and not the mythical, magical one-fix-that-will-make-HNQs-perfect. We should, did, and probably will continue to spend large amounts of time discussing other, deeper, more fundamental improvements to the mechanisms around HNQ. That is important and needs doing. It is not a reason to not act on good, simple, quick improvements that will have an immediate positive effect.

If someone is bleeding heavily from the arm, you can and should spend time talking about why they're bleeding, how to prevent similar such bleeding, what the best bandaging technique is, etc etc. But that's not a good reason to dither and delay on treating the immediate symptom, bandaging the bleeding arm.

We should continue to discuss things like how to give sites more control over their HNQs, and discuss the details in posts like, for example:

• Allow mods or gold tag badge holders to prevent question from being on hot network questions list
• Let mods (and 10k?) know when questions go “hot”

...but that's not a good reason to delay taking a simple, easy to spec, easy to schedule and easy to implement action that will clearly reduce how often curious-looking but low-quality questions get stuck in the HNQ list because they're (often inadvertently) clickbait-y to people who don't know the topic.

See also this related even-more-popular proposal, from 2014, Prevent questions on Hot List from being upvoted by casual visitors (only rep is from association bonus). I think that's maybe an even better solution - but the most important thing is that either this proposal or that one gets done, and another two years aren't spent ignoring the problem.