The credit system just sucks. It's a historical accident. But it's also not really realistic to say "In some cases you can get away with not worrying about your credit score if you're a tech worker."
As for "windfall vs. 9-5", I spent ~20 years in the latter category, a category which I'm not unlikely to end up in again, and I simply don't agree with you.
Maybe another way to put it is this: for all the problems you've had with personal finances, I assert that acquiring revolving credit is a good solution to none of them.
Finally: since litigating this further is inevitably going to involve getting into pretty squicky financial details and debates over personal financial decision-making, I'm going to stop here. Since I think you'll probably disagree with me, I want to be clear that I expect and will read any rebuttal to this that you write, but I'm not going to continue the debate.
It would be delightful to find an answer to some of the problems of bad credit. But it kind of matters.
1. You're right, in the sense that most people on HN with an established career in technology are, relatively speaking, "rich". That was my point: if you're stably employed in technology, your credit score might matter less than you think it does.
2. You're wrong, in the sense that with the exception of the credit card anecdote, which I related as a way of demonstrating that I had in fact had some interaction with my credit score, all of that post concerned stuff that happened long before we sold Matasano. By the standards of HN in 2017, in the mid-00's, I was most assuredly not rich (the way you mean it; I'm just stipulating your term). I've had terrible credit the whole time.
A big part of my point is that "just use cash" worked out much better for me than attempting to rely on credit. Obviously, if I worked as a retail clerk, that would a very problematic strategy. But I don't. If I had been able to resolve "need a new laptop" with credit instead of cash, I'd have been worse off.
I get that the rules are different for tech workers. Part of the point of saying this is to remind people that the rules may be more different for us than we think, which should have moral implications for us as well.