Ironically, we're not supposed to assume gender based on someone's name either.
You're perfectly allowed to use "they" since you weren't sure.
It's not nice to assume "he" to always be the default - that is what was being corrected. One did not have to know that "she" was correct, but it was easy to find out that "he" was probably wrong. Let's keep discussion on topic, rather than venturing into talking about what you're "allowed" to do.
I get that the gender of the author doesn't matter to you, and it may not even matter to the author of the article, but it does matter to a lot of people. No one is suggesting mistakes are a grave sin—even if her blog does say "Julia Evans" in giant letters right at the top. If someone makes one though, the correct response to people pointing it out is to accept the correction and keep it in mind for next time, not to accuse them of spam.