Saying "the error message is terrible" isn't particularly rude to begin with. And if you're having a one-on-one conversation with someone, saying "I think you're rude so I'm not going to answer your question" is one thing, but in a public forum, saying "You raise a valid question but I don't like how you phrased something so I'm going to explicitly refuse to answer the question, then lock the PR so nobody else can ask the question either, and screw anybody who actually wants to know the answer" is unacceptable. It's really user-hostile and makes me not want to use anything that maintainer is responsible for.
It's not much of an argument to say "well, it's not really that rude". Is it generous and gracious to communicate with people despite their rudeness? Sure. But should it an obligation, particularly for an open-source maintainer? Absolutely not.
Nor do I buy the "public forum" argument. You direct your writing to the audience you have (i.e., the person that asked you a question rudely), not an imagined audience that might be reading. "Lock the PR so nobody else can ask the question either, and screw anybody who actually wants to know the answer" is projecting; there's nothing about locking an issue that shuts down all conversations, just the one in the issue that is being discussed (that again, to emphasize, is a rude conversation anyway).
Saying the error message was terrible is barely rude at all. The only real problem with it is it's non-specific. And the poster edited their message to change the wording immediately anyway, the maintainer was only annoyed because GitHub emailed him the original contents of the comment.
So the maintainer took an extremely minor just-barely-qualifies-as-a slight and decided to react about as bad as you possibly can. It's awful.
And I'm not projecting either. zenspider had a legitimate complaint and a real question, both of which I care about. The complaint still hasn't been addressed, and the only way I was able to get an answer to the question was to ask here on HN. But that answer isn't visible to anyone else who looks at that PR (i.e. anyone who sees the changelog entry and wants to know why the CLT are now required), which I guarantee you is a nonzero number of people.
In my experience, low tolerance for negativity is a form of burn out dealing with people.
Even the thimble of energy required to ignore a comment is yet another thimble of energy taken from the pool when all you're doing is helping somebody.
The hard line approach might seem silly in isolation, but I don't think it's unreasonable. The slow creep of community negativity has burned me out on one of my own projects, a forum I run.
One perk of zero tolerance is that it spares you energy for more important decisions. People are quick to point out that it comes at the expense of alienating some folks, but nobody ever seems to care about discouraging the people actually doing the work.
