The initial back and forth isn't the issue, it was reasonably civil, if putting a bit of resistance to fixing the issue. The problem was the escalation which happened when it got posted to reddit, where the suddenly things got a whole lot more virtiolic and most of the vitriol was coming from those not involved in the original discussion at all. A similar thing tends to happen with systemd issues, for example (generally in that case they close the original issue to stop more comments and make a new issue or move discussion to a different platform, but still this will spill over into making new issues, PRs, etc). This behaviour is basically worthless to harmful whenever it happens, because it doesn't further the discussion in any way and just causes headaches for maintainers.