If you say you had no intention of being a jerk or putting anyone down, I believe you. But you did break the community standards (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I wish I could find a better way to persuade you not to post like that, because you obviously have valuable contributions to make.
Edit: maybe this would help. Sometimes people post harshly critical comments that are modeled after the communication style of more specialized environments, like literary reviews or academic colloquia. In those smaller environments, critique is often done in a concentrated and devastating style; that's how the game is played and how mastery is demonstrated, and it spurs the other players to get better.
The thing to understand is that this game doesn't work in large, flat internet spaces that are open to everybody. Here it just starts fires, drives away thoughtful participants, and encourages others—who are neither knowledgeable nor witty but far more numerous—to join in on what they think is the game, and it just gets degraded and degrading. The cost isn't worth it.
It took me years to understand this, because I don't like blandness in communication. Who wants verbal blancmange? What I didn't realize is how context-specific this is. The highly-critical game doesn't translate into the broader internet playing field. It just makes things nasty and dumb. I've written about this in the past with this analogy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237524 and more linked from there.
Basically, it's a case of the-medium-is-the-message. We need to adjust our commenting style to the reality of the internet forum, or this place will get worse than it already is.
In this case, I commented more harshly than I usually do because it's important for authors to be able to come here to contribute and not be met with garden-variety, albeit highbrow, toxicity. That makes HN strictly worse: it disincentivizes thoughtful people to participate and encourages hostility and snark. Feedback loops like that are all too easy to get going and they're an existential threat to this place.
michaelfeathers has been a good HN contributor in the past, as well as a distinguished author on software topics. Who cares if his blog post was "shallow, informal"? That's what blog posts are for. If someone else has deeper and more formal knowledge of a topic, that's wonderful: it puts them in a position to teach something to the rest of us here, which is obviously in the spirit of this site. If people want to play the intellectual bully, though, they should find another place to do that.