If anything is disproportionate in your examples, it’s the reactions of those against merging the pull request. Using “he/him” in technical documentation is as tone-deaf as using “she/hers” when writing recipes. Men, women and non-binary engineers exist and we should not hold principles that prevent entirely innocuous changes like changing “him” to “their” in a readme, period. The only reason that GitHub PR thread and the Joyent blog post escalated as they did was the strong reaction by the individuals who were against the change. If the PR was just merged, there would’ve been no controversy.

There were valid reasons to reject the change:

> Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth.

> You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

Even if you don't agree, nothing in there even comes close to justifying the abuse leveled against the developer. A small documentation change led to the departure of a core developer. Was it worth it?

It led to Ben's departure because he abjectly refused to listen to the user community, encouraged a tremendous amount of public debate over his personal decision to go against the community's wishes, then single-handedly reverted Isaac Childers' commit accepting the change with the following pithy comment[0]:

> Revert "doc: Removed use of gendered pronouns"

> @isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty

> to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either

> me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided.

Do you feel that this is acceptable behavior that should be encouraged? Ben was fully in the wrong here, and if this was instead about Tabs vs Spaces instead of something political in nature, we wouldn't be having this debate. Ben acted childishly, was called out on it, and then _decided to leave of his own volition_ because he felt he was unwanted, which was true given his behavior.

Was it worth it? I don't know, ask Ben.

[0]https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

> encouraged a tremendous amount of public debate

I don't think "debate" is the right word for what happened in that thread.

> then single-handedly reverted Isaac Childers' commit

A perfectly good reason for reverting the commit was provided in the message itself: "All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert." It looks like the patch didn't meet that criteria. He also cited other valid reasons for rejecting it: "have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc."

Is this change so overwhelmingly important and urgent that it overrides the aforementioned policy and concerns? I don't know.

Does the fact he rejected the patch excuse the way people reacted to his decision? No.