I don’t think in 1982 they had issues with it - most problems that this article purports angle brackets to have are problems we have recently invented.
As for HN not being able to handle having them as characters in titles, one would hope that would be a “simple” matter of escaping the characters at time of submission and parsing them at time of rendering.
As for HN not being able to handle having them as characters in titles, one would hope that would be a “simple” matter of escaping the characters at time of submission and parsing them at time of rendering.