People with enormous power and wealth are frequently terrible across all industries. I'm still fairly convinced Kalanick has more in common with Weinstein and Miki Agrawal than your average trenches-level programmer, simply because power corrupts. (If tech has a singular problem, it's that startup culture means some people are in power for their whole careers.)
And at the trenches level: yeah, brilliant assholes are a thing in software. And classical music, and physics, and law, and... They're all specialized fields with noninterchangeable work, power-law payouts, and room to minimize human interaction in daily work.
I don't disagree with you that this happens in the field, and I definitely appreciate hearing from people in the field who might agree with this article. But it still feels like there's a pattern of comparing Silicon Valley to Wallstreet, while ignoring the myriad other fields with similar dynamics. That, not the existence of assholes, is the part that feels agenda-driven to me.