Quilette is a highly partisan libertarian-right publication and you'd be well advised to treat it as trolling.
It's not "libertarian" in the way Reason magazine is, or "right-wing" in the way that Fox News is.
I think its editors broadly identify as "classical liberals", and they have a stated mission of challenging the "blank-slate" view of human nature.
You can disagree with these positions, but they're legitimate subject areas that reasonable people can discuss, and it deserves better than to be dismissed as you have - even if some of its articles get it wrong, as this one seems to have done.
This is incoherent: either you're a believer in something like Locke's "free and equal in the state of nature", or you're not a "classical liberal".
I guess the point is we've had ~350 years of scientific discovery and philosophical musings since Locke, and we still don't have simple answers to any of this stuff.
I don't think any serious commentator today (on Quillette or elsewhere) would argue that the existence of some degree of innateness of human nature should pre-determine anyone to a lesser level of freedom or equality or ability to thrive in the world.
I think they'd argue that a better understanding of the former is necessary in order to improve the latter.
At least I would, as someone who has significant skin in the game in terms of my own ability to function.
I happen to be sympathetic with a lot of their viewpoints, but it is in fact very axe-grindy. Reason magazine comes off as a lot more reasonable to me than Quillette, despite not being a libertarian, because it's less reactionary.
I'm with you on the axe-grindiness of Quillette, and since you mention it, that's probably why I don't read it much anymore.
"Libertarian" can mean all kinds of things these days, but in the comment to which I was replying, the description connotes associations with things like: extreme positions against state welfare and gun control, extreme laissez-faire economic policy, social Darwinism, Ayn Rand, the Tea Party, etc.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, these themes seem to appear quite frequently in Reason Magazine, and they certainly do on Fox News.
They aren't a focus for Quillette, however, which in my experience, generally embraces more moderate/centrist (i.e., classical liberal) positions on economic and social issues.
The axe-grindiness to which you refer would stem from the fact that a big part of its raison d'être is to confront what it sees as the ideological corruption of academia.
I agree it can be quite histrionic in its coverage of this issue, and it doesn't hold much interest for me.
But it still matters to demarcate between "highly partisan libertarian-right" and more moderate, sober ideological positions.