This is not meant to criticize you, OP, personally. Rather, I just want to point out a structural double standard.
+1000 to the author for raising specific accessibility concerns and contrasting (no pun intended) the colour palates with those of other sites. The old “dark gray on light gray; tiny text” style (see: daring fireball of days past) drives me nuts.
I think the author makes fantastic points and it’s unfortunate that the somewhat mean spirited language distracts from those points, leading to this discussion rather than a more substantive one about accessibility. Not the end of the world either way.
Having said that, I think it's a safe bet to assume that one doesn't "only" find such tone policing comments when the author is a woman, because one almost always finds such tone-policing comments on hacker news whenever there's an opportunity to complain about tone.
It is not that HN doesn't already have a "baseline obsession" with tone or that male authors never fall victim to this. But rather, one can observe a trend where such tone-policing comments are more likely to occur and get upvoted if the author is a woman. And on the flip-side, comments commending a harsher, "more" honest or rant-y tone are more likely to occur when the post was written by a male author.
I don't know if it does or not but without evidence this is just conjecture from all sides.
Consider that you may yourself be sexist.
You present no evidence either. I think comments like yours actually want their accusation to be true because it gives you some sort of power and moral clout.
TFA is written like a tweet. It’s indeed obnoxious. It should be somewhat of a red flag that you felt the need to bring up gender. It’s also a lazy accusation. Though the accusation is very trendy these days.