The fact that you can't separate their work ethic and value as employees from your judgment of the company as a whole is an analytical failure. These are distinct things.
In 2015, Uber employed 1,200+ engineers. Some of them worked in insular settings like self-driving research where they might never meet the people recently in the news, or even hear stories. (Yes, some of this has hit the news before. No, that doesn't mean everyone heard about it, even in-industry.)
Compare to some place like Amazon, where it's pretty well-established that the answer to "how's the engineering culture?" is "depends entirely on which part of engineering you're in". If you dislike the Amazon.com product ranking team, are you going to blackball AWS SREs for it?
If the idea is that Uber's business model itself is the ethical problem, then yeah, you could hold all the engineers accountable for that. But that's a very different question than the internal crises.
(Also, do remember that "ample other opportunity" isn't very applicable to anyone on a visa tied to Uber.)
I don't really agree with the rest of your comment (I think Uber has had enough broad ethical problems over the last several years that hearing stories would be inevitable), but this is a fair point, and I'd like to acknowledge that I missed it. Thank you for pointing this out.
I seem to recall hearing somewhere that relationships are voluntary too, and there's groups offering help to anyone looking to escape a bad one. Yet, blaming people for not leaving immediately tends to be rather frowned on.
Is the difference just that in one case you're getting paid, and are therefore transformed into a perfectly rational homo economicus? Is it that it's easier to (know you need to) leave if the only danger is to your morals rather than to your physical body? Is it somehow easier to recognize moral danger than physical danger?
It is not nearly the same with companies.
Also the issue here is not that they accepted being abused, it is the suspicion that they contributed to toxicity. It might be unfair to quite a few of them, but it is still very different.
I'm not defending the primary analogy, but this is bizarre to me. As I grew up, many different people told me about the importance of loyalty to coworkers (and by implication employers). I heard about how you have to show you're willing to stick around for the long haul, dedicate yourself to a business, and suck it up when things are bad. At least if you're the one suffering, lots of people will tell you to stay with a company regardless. The phrase "paying your dues" is all about this.
Yeah, 20-somethings and software devs are both known for being a bit more mercenary than that. I think that s a good thing, since it encourages companies to act responsibly.
But there is still a strong culture that expects loyalty to employers, even when they're treating you poorly. It's not universal, but for some people it comes from most of the people they care about.
Not everyone who could easily change jobs realizes it, especially after being worked out on awhile by a workplace culture that seems to prioritize gaslighting good engineers into thinking they're poor ones - cf. Fowler, and imagine how much worse it is for someone less confident in herself.
Not everyone who realizes they could change jobs does so, and not because they like the shitty culture where they are - Uber uses golden handcuffs, too, and that's not an Uber problem, but a startup culture problem in general.
Abusive relationships tend to end when the victim gets a "wake-up call" - a moment that takes them outside the narrow perspective their abuser has been at such pains to create, and brings home the reality of their situation. There are certainly people at Uber for whom Fowler's article, and the follow-on exposés it's prompted, have constituted just such a moment. And now that they're trying to get away from their abuser, they get to deal with being stereotyped this way? That's trivialization.
I would also bet that even at the most toxic of workplaces there are pockets of normalcy.