But is that advice less callous/from-the-internet-abyss if a therapist were to give it? (I am not a licensed therapist or anything).

I got the feeling from the article that it was more like someone sending a drive-by email along the lines of "wow this code is bad, I could have done it completely different, you're not even that good of python" after he submitted some patch that a less toxic person would have thanked him for or something.