The handling of this incident made me very angry, principally because it's so hard to get MIT students to seek mental health counseling because they are very fearful of retaliation for doing so. The misuse of the mental health survey totally validated their concerns and severely damaged the fragile trust that various orgs student health orgs unaffiliated with this incident at MIT had worked hard to build with students.
Also, this article does a poor job of explaining the recent history leading up to the closing of Senior House, which better explains why the closing of the house was viewed as a total attack on alternative culture. MIT didn't just close senior house, they also knocked down Bexley, another alternative dorm, a few years earlier under somewhat dubious circumstances (suddenly refusing to repair the dorm post flooding iirc?) without proper student input, and I believe there was controversy about a third alternative dorm as well. The students' interpretation of this was that the MIT administration was fundamentally targeting alternative culture and were not negotiating in good faith during any of these closures.