But the point of the article, which matches my own observations, is that comments pouring guilt onto maintainers is commonplace. The depth of feeling it invokes in the maintainer is likely orders of magnitude more than the depth of caring on the part of the commentator.

The normal commentator who complains is probably not malicious, probably not aware of the pain they might cause, is probably just not even thinking of that angle.

Yes, I think that’s what made this attack so effective: that kind of abuse is normalized in much of the tech world so it’s very easy to miss that in this targeted case it was coming from accounts with no prior involvement in the community. I like the open feel we’ve had for the last 3 decades but I do think this will likely mean a lot of projects becoming less open, which is warranted but going to suck for people trying to start a career.