You're looking at this with statistical, risk management. There's a subset of risk management that focused on what's called "catastrophic," risk management. That's when the impact of the event, which is rare but can happen, is so high that one is willing to go the extra mile to prevent it. This includes obvious examples like nuclear powerplants having ridiculous security or classified systems being air gapped with dedicated, physical lines. However, there's less-obvious cases where the same thinking is employed:
One company's head of security at WTC started doing evacuation drills after the 1990's bombing thinking something destructive to whole building is worth having a plan for. He said all but 5 people got out in 2001. In same place, a bank was running OpenVMS clusters on high-quality hardware with a far-away site in case something happened to the building (standard concern, too). They claimed those nodes were the last thing that failed with no transactions lost. Everything else was destroyed.
People often consider hurricanes, tornados, flood levels, wild fires, and earthquakes before moving into an area. Lots of folks avoid Tornado Alley and the Southern/Southeastern Coast for that reason. One person thinking floods might get bad in Texas put an inflatable, rubber circle filled with water around their house. It was only one floodwaters went around instead of through. Likewise, the Hurricane Architecture article said author [statistically-unnecessarily] went with dedicated servers and architecture for super-high volume. Became main source for news during flood for entire state with tons of traffic. Kept folks informed.
Lots of people either don't put political/religious/relationship/work information social media or periodically delete it to make digging up previous dirt on them harder. It either takes no effort (former) or small effort (latter). The endless volume of folks getting quoted before being slammed online or being fired at work suggests this is a rational practice. Also, as Schneier says about crypto, the number and effectiveness of such attacks seem to go up overtime where traditional, risk assessment is nearly impossible.
Certain appliances, like toasters and tumble dryers, cause a disproportionate amount of homes to be destroyed. Many homeowners make sure they're only used when someone is there to react to damage. For toasters, some people also unplug them when not in use (idk if that matters). At least "person is there" is a costless precaution that prevent loss of entire home.
Another which is sometimes labeled discrimination is folks staying out of the hood to avoid being violently assaulted. There's quite a few hoods in Memphis, TN near me. Most people, regardless of race or gender, avoid them if they can since they don't want to be mugged, raped, beaten, or killed. When weighing that, people consider the psychological effect it would have on them. If they don't live there, the choice is (a) go meet people, do stuff, etc where I almost certainly won't experience violence or (b) go do same stuff where said violence is reported (or not) several times a day in those same places. Most people, again all groups, do (a) to avoid cost of (b) since it's never worth it to them. Some do (b), though, for a variety of reasons. Just saying it to acknowledge they exist.
In the main article, these are rational, successful people are similarly facing a catastrophic risk that's got an entire movement behind the tools that make it work. They don't know odds of it happening but do know the cost is end-of-career and frequency is increasing. They are rightly thinking in terms of catastrophic, risk mitigation where the entire class of risk is mitigated since the cost is unbearable. Although I disagree on specifics, they're definitely right to mitigate a catastrophic risk increasing in frequency. It's what they usually do. Me too.