The word to keep in mind here is 'can', or I would say 'may'. The increasing tendency of crying wolf at anything you don't like by squeezing it into a category where it can't rock the boat anymore is not really helping us move forward collectively.

I would say, if it's Millenial Style Snark (gawd I hate to brand all millennials that way but they do tend to sound like the younger halo/gta 5/etc playing crowd) where they say something stupid like "Tests or STFU" or "callbacks or GTFO", yeah, that's tiresome. It's the kind of tone I saw occasionally in early nodejs discussions. I wouldn't call that snark, however.

So I agree with your last statement. Snark to me implies a wit or cleverness as well as defiance and challenge. This is why it worked for Dijkstra. The brevity of the messages above are just a show of a lack of ability or desire to communicate and clearly express an idea. The above are just unnecessarily verbally abusive. They incite a negative response before the person even has had a chance to process other meanings of the message.