"virtual lynching"

Hyperbole much?

"...to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent..."

That was (imo) the worst part of the blog post. You're comparing death threats from obsessed fans of a platform known for being filled with users of a younger age, to angry backhanded tweets and blog posts from professional software developers.

C'mon now.