The one who feels personally attacked is the article's writer IMO. From this article and others from his website you can see he clearly has a problem with new developers, especially those from JavaScript. A lot of resentment can be read between lines.
In general HN tends to express resentment towards web developers, especially those who make use of JavaScript frameworks. You can find people ranting about web development on this site at least once a week. I mainly chalk it up to those people having no fucking clue what they're talking about because they don't have the relevant experience, like a physicist talking about politics. They are smart and knowledgeable about things I will never understand, but they don't know anything about this and should probably shut up instead.
Whether they are right or not, complaining about the modern web development practices on this website is a waste of keystrokes, because no one is listening.
