I'm not sure that's it. Using anime and geek references in a presentation to 'the suits' is going to be jarring and either missed or frowned upon, but using it amongst devs is perfectly accepted. It fits the mold of a status issue. Comic sans, though, would likely receive a -worse- reception amongst those technically inclined, because we've been implicitly trained not to use it by seeing how it's talked about (on places like Hacker News). In fact, making a big deal about it seems -exactly- the sort of thing that happens amongst the low status people; designers balking at it being unprofessional, and devs balking because we like to nitpick (it's like finding a misspelled word in the slides).

It might be related to status, but in that case it's complicated; the low status people are looking for ways to appear high status (avoid comic sans), or ways to make others appear low status (eww, look, he used comic sans), whereas the high status people want to protect the integrity of status; a low status person using comic sans is likely viewed a bit patronizing ('well he's a dev; they don't know any better'), and another high status person would be more likely to be defended for the choice, if not have it outright ignored ('the content is what's important; he was just having a bit of fun').