It seems to me that the knee-jerk opposition to "wokeness" always comes from people who would rather sweep problems that don't affect them under the rug than acknowledge that they need to be fixed. They are the aloof, socially normative people in this article, utterly confused by and thus dismissive of the struggles of those outside of society's standard ingroup.
"We weren't like this 10 years ago" because, as the article describes, those concerns were previously ignored by the mainstream because they didn't fit the experiences or interests of those who had influence over the mainstream. Now that those institutions have lost that filtering power, we're hearing from more real people with more real problems. Healthcare access, structural racism, mental health resources, poverty, etc. They are taking their little hammers to our Twitter feeds. The solution isn't to shame and ignore the people complaining about them - it is to fix those societal issues that cause the pain to begin with.