That's why "Sir, please don't raise your voice" is so condescending and just a way to make it look like the other party is escalating.

It's not just a way to do that. There's no point imputing a motivation you made up to the other person. It's doing exactly what you're saying they're guilty of: assuming.

I get what they’re saying though. It often has an accompanying tone that’s borderline meme-like. It’s this thing we say the moment somebody takes a tone we take any issue with - or we think we can publicly proclaim we take issue with to get those around us on our side. I think many of us were guilty of this at least once and would acknowledge it if we really sat back and thought about it.

The number of times I’ve seen people having a discussion with somebody online and they respond with “bro, calm down“ when the person has used no caps lock, no exclamation points, no particularly vitriolic language, is staggering and incredibly irritating.

The obvious solution to this: spend less time reading pointless online arguments, and go outside and touch grass.

to keep in line with the topic of communication styles and assumptions, this reads (to me) like a long version "bro, calm down" :).

I’m not quite sure why what I said warranted such an incredibly rude response.

Unfortunately words may be interpreted differently to how they are intended. My apologies if you took offence, as that wasn't my intention. I do often make snarky remarks on here but this wasn't meant to be one of them.

I think this is part of what I'm getting at, text conversations are missing eye contact, body language cues etc, and along with the anonymity of the internet, a lot of things can be misinterpeted and disagreements can escalate quickly.

I normally try not to engage in it too much - when the sun is shining and it's a beautiful day I'd rather be out exercising and patting peoples dogs than engaging in Internet drama. That is all.

Yep. The reason a lot of people do it is not to de-escalate. Quite the opposite. It's to give the appearance of de-escalation to outsiders while at the same time escalating the argument by using a fallacy to attempt to irritate the other person.

My mom’s side of the family is descendent from Italians. Sunday barbecues were always full of yelling, shouting and cursing at each other.

I miss those times. By the end of the day, everybody would hug and kiss and say goodbye until next Sunday.

Yes, a good example. That's what I meant by a "range of emotional responses" (emphasis added).

Also, our interpretation depends on context, such as in your example, and many other things. It's a bit argumentative to treat a short HN comment as a roadmap of every human interaction and find flaws.