These days it's not much more gendered than the word guys which is now frequently used to refer to mixed sex groups. And anyway Doug McIlroy is male so what exactly is your complaint?
Perhaps you could suggest an alternative?
The piece would be better without the closing section entirely. McIlroy demonstrated a different, not competing and not in any sense "courageous" or "daring", approach to program design.
The unfortunate closing statement is the single reason I didn't include this in our shell programming onboarding documentation as a motivating example of how shell fluency can help solve ad hoc questions.
And it got flagged. HN: still a bro club after all these years.