Totally agreed, accusing someone of "playing the victim card" is a super lame oratorical trick, frequently used by people who don't realize that that's what they're doing. It's up there with saying, "now, I know it may not be politically correct to say this...", which is pretty much 100% of the time followed by some completely idiotic statement. The trick is that it sets up an environment where objecting to the idiotic statement is preemptively made to sound like some sort of hypersensitive political correctness.
It's essentially saying that not only should Sarah Sharp be willing to put up with all the hostility, but that the only reason she's complaining about it is to make a political point. It's a way of snidely arguing that she can't possibly actually care about the issue. That's far more dismissive of other people's reactions than anything Linus Torvalds is complaining about, and yet he's trying to claim that he has the inclusive moral high ground and Sarah Sharp is the one who's ignoring the fact that different people react differently.