In my reading of the Reddit thread I did not take away that patent examiner just gets to decide that something seems obvious. Instead, the reasoning seems to be that if no prior art for an invention exists, it could therefor not have been obvious. This seems sort of sensible as it is very hard to determine if a truly novel invention is obvious. Hindsight bias being a core part of the problem. So they seem to have moved away from a more metaphysical problem of determining obviousness to just trying to determine if an invention of novel, which at least has some grounding in objective reality.