I would agree there is a line, but disagree that the original poster stepped over it. Disagreement, even vigorous disagreement is important.
Calling out bad technical decisions is important.
Calling out oversensitive people who want to censor online discourse to their personal tastes is also important.
Furthermore, ad hominem attacks have nothing to do with "calling out bad technical decisions."
BTW go take my words verbatim and use it against me if my actions are genuinely hypocritical. But to do that for my actions you made up is abusive and makes you look bad.
Fair, but I'd hold HN to a higher standard. We're peers and we choose to be here. We should treat each other with kindness and respect, not contempt. I read a fair amount of contempt in OP's characterization, and I hold that separate from respectful criticism.
I looked up a thread about this from 2020 [0] and it actually seems well reasoned, calm, and respectful. No one's slinging around words like "faulty", "broken", or "harm" because those tend to insult people and derail technical discussions.
And FWIW, that's why I would get managers involved if this happened in the workplace. Calling people's work "broken by design" or "harmful" is how to start an argument, not how to solve a problem. If someone's acting this way, there's no way things are going well.
> intentionally-faulty software
> the maintainer only caved
> he's harming his users with his stubbornness
is strong language and not productive. If someone at my company sincerely criticized my work in this way I'd find it unacceptable and managers would get involved. There's criticism and there's polemics, and this is the latter.