I don't think it's about labeling people as being good or bad, but more about not letting things stand.
If you encounter attitudes from people that are hostile towards you, you can either speak up and allow them to correct themselves (or double-down) or be silent and give your tacit approval.
I think sometimes opinions are best left to change slowly or through exposure, when you approach things in this way it often just comes off as hostile and that doubling down you're talking about becomes a much more common response.
> In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes?
I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence.
Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation.
Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction".
[1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of... [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004 [3] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/882735106070376451