Is it really being a dick when someone explicitly, through choice of a license, allows it? What is this post from Microsoft except an explicit and public thank you? Which seems like it should certainly appease the "not a dick" criteria to me...

If that's all they did it wouldn't be so bad. However, they also discussed the project, future improvements, etc with the strong implication that they would hire him or pay for his work so far. This could have been well intentioned but you can't tell from the outside and people tend to default to assuming bad things about actions taken by large companies.

Microsoft isn’t a human being, terrible or otherwise.

The employee writing the announcement for the project is a person though. "Microsoft" hasn't done that.