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Eclipses happen pretty regularly. This one is significant because it will be at 90% across a bunch of Europe so people are posting about it, but solar eclipses and lunar eclipses do happen once or twice a year on a fairly regular cycle. Meteor showers also happen seasonally because they're caused by the Earth passing through trails in space on its path round the Sun. Therefore the two things aligning is something that kind of either always happens or never happens, and as it is it generally happens around the same time. All that said, its fairly neat that the eclipse and the peak of the perseids is the exact same day this year.

No such defense can be made for "wow a planetary alignment", that's just stupid shit for idiots, sorry. The planets are not specially lined up, they exist on roughly the same plane because everything in the solar system goes round roughly the same way. The planets aren't more or less aligned than usual. Saturn and Mars recently became visible again after being absent most of the year, but you need to be up in the small hours of the morning to see them well. Jupiter and Mercury are going to be barely visible for about 5 minutes before sunrise if you have utterly perfect viewing conditions. Neptune and Uranus aren't really observable unless you have university funding. Venus just went below the horizon recently. In total, Saturn and Mars will be really viewable the same day as the eclipse and not really until the next morning.