I guess I think the expectations of the dev aren't very realistic either, but I don't see what the goal of this post is, the messages pasted onto it don't paint the picture that the first part of the post tries to say exists.
What Mike Roberts should have done, upon seeing Bob Stratton's second email, is walked over to Bob's office/cube/desk/where-ever and had a very long heart-to-heart talk with Bob about his incredibly poor handling of the situation.
Nothing "amiable" about it. It is a threat, pure and simple.
It's not true that if they don't get kik package on npm they'll loose their trademark. It's not true that they can't prevent their lawyers from going after him, there are multiple ways to avoiding that. 30k$ is not high price for doing something you never had any intention of doing.
Which is not unreasonable. That moved the discussion from a single module to an entire project.
Furthermore, since companies are actually required to enforce trademarks, the comment is nothing more of a reminder of what would necessarily have to happen. It's not like they could just ask the lawyers not to enforce the trademark.