Keep in mind that persevering with this style in your writing may mostly serve to detract from what you’re actually trying to communicate to others.
I'm perfectly happy to deny those people the perhaps-dubious benefit of my viewpoint. I'm sharing knowledge, not making a sales pitch, and I'm not especially worried about getting beaten up anymore.
The year thing is more analogous to a very weird pronunciation of a word by the speaker, everything starts off regular then they say the word and everyone’s distracted for a moment while they try to process what the person meant, they make a best guess and go back listening to the speaker with their undivided attention again.
Then the speaker does the weird pronunciation again, and again the listener loses their train of thought, (maybe thinking, there it is again, it really seems like they are trying to say xxx), and again the listener might have missed a little of what the speaker was saying.
After a few times of this the listener finally feels confident in what the speaker is trying to communicate and it’s no longer significantly distracting.
My takeaway from listening to such a speaker would always be prefixed with the fact they tried to push a viewpoint (that something should be pronounced differently) which is completely tangential to the topic they were speaking about, which is to say, they seem to care more about expressing this pronunciation agenda such that they’re willing to sabotage the expression and communication of their primary topic.
Perhaps a level of familiarity with the convention plays a role, as I have chanced upon the Long Now Foundation and some of its writings. Despite, that was a long time ago. There are competing conventions such as writing the year 2000 as 102000 so as to reflect a common estimate of the origin of our species, which I encountered via kurzgesagt.
I support the author’s rebuttal that if the slightly unusual year number prevents you from taking in the content and its points, you might just not be a member of the intended audience.
There’s no relationship between people who would appreciate the history the author was trying to communicate, and people who aren’t distracted by prefixing a pointless zero before the date.
Unless you really meant that as a snide comment calling GP an idiot.
Either way, maybe the zero prefixing thing is just stupid and not the hill to die on you seem to think it is.
What are you talking aboot?
I personally encountered people arguing that using PCs (as opposed to VAXen or mainframes) was a waste of time as late as 01992. And I actually even sort of joined them; although I'd been using PCs since before the IBM PC, once I got access to the internet in 01992, I pretty much stopped using PCs as anything but a terminal or a game machine for years, spending virtually 100% of my computer time on VMS or Ultrix. When I was using PCs again, it was because I could run BSD/386 and Linux on them, in 01994.
(Maybe you'd assume from my own story of enthusiastic adoption that "nobody ever sat in countless meetings asking[,] "How can we use the internet?"', but if so, you'd be extremely wrong. In 01992 and even in 01994 there were lots of people who thought the internet was useless or a fad. Bill Gates's The Road Ahead, published November 01995, barely mentioned the internet, instead treating it as a sort of failed experiment that would be supplanted by the Information Superhighway. Metcalfe predicted in 01996 that it would collapse. David Isenberg was still arguing against "Bellheads" and their "Advanced Intelligent Network" in 01997: https://isen.com/stupid.html)
It can be easy looking back in retrospect to oversimplify events like these with the benefit of hindsight, imagining that the things that seem obvious now were obvious then. But not only weren't they obvious—in many cases, they could have turned out differently. I think it was Alan Kay that argued that, without the invention of the sort of graphical user interface used by most non-cellphone personal computers today, the personal computer as we know it never would have become a mass-market phenomenon (though video game consoles were) and therefore Moore's Law would have stalled out decades ago. I'm not sure he was right, but it seems like a plausible alternate history to me.
Of course, there were "killer apps" as early as VisiCalc for the Apple ][. Accountants and corporate executives were willing to read through the manual and take the time to learn how to use it, because it was such a powerful tool for what they were doing. But it was designed for specialists; it's not a UI that rewards casual use the way Excel or MacPaint or NCSA Mosaic is. Without the GUI, or if the GUI had come much later, plausibly personal computers would have remained a niche hobbyist thing for much longer, while somebody like Nintendo would have locked down the unwashed-masses platform—as we now see happening with Android. And (maybe this is obvious) that would have made it immensely less useful.