I think there’s a few elements to it. The biggest part of it is that this comic artist has never done comics in this tone and the artist was already getting memed pretty often for generally “not that funny” jokes.

When this came out, it gave everyone whiplash because, well, who the fuck decided to make a comic about their wife’s miscarriage? I would get it to have a plain text media post or similar, but that was an odd step to take. IMO, that’s not something I’d casually drop in your otherwise innocuous comic strip.

Then the internet did its thing and the rest is history.