My guess is that the Whateley Academy stuff is similar to all the Pinball examples that popped up around 2016 or so. All of the Pinball entries and the entire category itself were written by one guy.
I think we have a similar thing with the Whateley Academy. I've never read the comic but if it's a Whedon-esque take on the X-Men, it probably was well-liked by Fast Eddie and most of the founding "Old Guard" of the site since they were all huge Joss Whedon fans.
You probably had a single sperg keeping the vigil and posting new examples during the site's weeb phase in the late 2000's and early 2010's, and now it's found a new audience with the troons in the turbo-woke TV Tropes of the Fighteer regime.
True, but Harry Potter remained in the cultural mainstream throughout the 2010's thanks to the movies and the spin-offs plus a very large and very vocal fandom. I could understand why Reddit would bring up Harry Potter, same reason why they'd bring up Star Wars or Marvel Comics. It's one of those older pop culture works that has (or had) some staying power.