Well, they know there are hundreds of millions of others who use their work, thousands who worked with them, and a trillion dollar industry built on their labor and effort, and that they have spoken their mind, with no BS, and no fake niceties like it's the norm.

I guess they can always take comfort in that.

Others don't want certain kinds of people to "want to talk to them" in the first place, so they are non-polite towards their kind on purpose.

And a final similar case is wanting people to talk to you only if they can stand that level of discussion/no BS talk/bluntness/sense of humor/profanity/etc. So that you can be yourself among them, and they can be themselves with you, with no facades.

I, for one, pretty much prefer being spoken to that way, instead of a sanitized corporate newspeak that means exactly the same thing but uses "professional" words.

I think people mean well when they talk about empathy and kindness, but those concepts assume that the only reality is how we feel and speak about things, when generally it's the underlying reality that is painful or harsh. And when you have to deliver a product, you can't avoid that reality.

I try to address it by frequently talking about my own fuckups and thus making it easier for junior devs to understand that failing is something we all go through.

But nothing can change the fact that it hurts to invest deeply in something and see it fail. We can't make pain go away, so it's better to just get it over with and learn to adapt to it and be resilient.