You noticed it mostly because you've got a pretty keenly-trained eye from participation on our other sites. There's a few things at play here, I'll get into them individually.
First, preventing certain things from hitting the 'hot' list.
We do this, but as sparingly as possible. For the most part we try to make sure nothing with trigger words that could seriously offend and / or upset someone are in that list. I won't say conclusively what those words are, because I'd be making it easier for trolls to work around them, but we take some precautions.
The rest of the 'hotness' is completely organic, by the individual communities, and all of them have some different rules and expectations when it comes to the kinds of questions that they entertain.
Now, as to why that caught your eye.
Some sites do allow recommendation questions to some extent, in fact we have a site all about recommendation questions. When new communities rally around products like CraftCMS to create a helpful self-support structure, they want to make sure the space works for them. What? I can't ask about hosting options on a site dedicated to (CMS)? There's no reason to enforce rules that could drive away much needed participation and engagement when the problems those rules solve aren't even a problem on that particular site - and might not ever be.
We don't allow these on Stack Overflow because we had a major problem with them at scale. They don't age particularly well, they tend to attract answers that quickly become obsolete, and they tend to be a breeding ground for spam. But, that's Stack Overflow's problem, that doesn't necessarily mean that other (much smaller) sites are going to run into the same issues. As long as mindless fun and extremely poor quality posts don't overtake a site, we give communities as much latitude as they need in order to figure out what works for them.
In short, if it isn't offending or hurting anyone, and the community behind it thinks it's hot stuff, then we're happy to aggregate it for a while. That question (despite being in the hot list) didn't come close to going off the rails, and they have plenty of other (much deeper) questions on the site.
Overthinking? If you weren't an avid user, I'd say yes :P Since you are? Nah, you just noticed something that didn't quite fit the mold you're used to.
