If you as a designer, ignore how your system makes user feels, you're doing UX wrong. System should bring joy to user, not cause annoyance.

That post is just a rationalization.

"People feel like part of their soul by a CSS animation.. I think it’s kind of funny.", is no different than

"People feel like a part of their soul is extracted by a single eval statement... I think it's kind of funny"

Granted there are some requests that might be ignored with ease, like someone hating on something because of your opinion, but feelings of users should be appealed to.

The Kudo is either:

A) deliberate ploy to seem more interesting than it is

B) a badly designed +1 button

seems like it, why not just invent a big number?