I try to remain at arms length with regards to discussions about NodeBB and Discourse, but one thing I want to point out is that over the years, there have been numerous topics about NodeBB on meta.d, and vice versa.
We keep every single topic about Discourse on community.nodebb.org, even if inflammatory, because it more often than not spawns discussion about some failing of NodeBB that Discourse does well, and that we should probably address it sooner rather than later. If it means it caused somebody to ditch NodeBB for Discourse, then so be it -- they made an informed decision.
Conversely, to my knowledge, there are very few backlinks to NodeBB on meta.d. Any time a new topic comes up, it is deleted fairly quickly.