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.
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.