I hear you that there was a provocation in that bit. But it's a matter of degree. From my point of view, the GP comment may have been wrong and even bad (let's assume that's so), but by itself that doesn't break the site guidelines. People are allowed to be wrong in comments; it's up to the community to debate what's right vs. wrong and sort that out.
The way to respond to wrong comments is to refute them with better arguments and better information. This can be done without breaking the site guidelines. Of course there are downsides to this approach—it's a lot more time-consuming to patiently refute wrongness than to post it in the first place. But the downsides of breaking the site guidelines are much greater—that path basically leads to conflagration, and we'd like to avoid having this place burn to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
The way to respond to wrong comments is to refute them with better arguments and better information. This can be done without breaking the site guidelines. Of course there are downsides to this approach—it's a lot more time-consuming to patiently refute wrongness than to post it in the first place. But the downsides of breaking the site guidelines are much greater—that path basically leads to conflagration, and we'd like to avoid having this place burn to a crisp. Scorched earth is not interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).