Sorry for the confusion, I was referencing how it would be unusual to hear SE staff today talking about why downvoting is an important quality-control feature and how it can be made more useful and more helpful for new users, rather than just condemning downvotes as hostile. In fact, the blog post you linked was at the forefront of my mind as an example of SE staff not "getting it."
Stack Overflow's moderation system has not scaled very well; it's unhelpful for new users, and frustrating for power users and volunteer moderators. The company has largely refused to address these issues since about ~2015, when they promised a series of grandiose moderation overhauls and...never implemented any of it.
Since then, their usual strategy for dealing with moderation failures is to throw the community under the bus. The article you linked caused a lot of drama within the community, because it accused volunteers of "judging users for not knowing things" for performing basic moderation tasks like marking questions as duplicates -- a feature that's supposed to help users by pointing them to an authoritative answer. The duplicate feature has a lot of warts; it does not adequately explain how users can nominate their question for reopening by clarifying why it's not a duplicate, and even if it was discoverable the reopen process is horribly broken anyway. But instead of addressing the obvious issues with the moderation system, they just wrote a blog post about how hostile their volunteers are.
A longtime SE power user explained it better than I could: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777
> For years, you have been working on cleaning up an oil drip out of a beautiful lake with a spoon, but the small spoon you have is actually a fork. You've spent years asking for at least a spoon to work with, but have gotten nothing. For some reason, though, you keep at it with the fork, for different reasons - some are the people next to you also working with forks, some are the occasional diamond that you can clean and set and make nice - all for free and out of your own time.
> Then, one day [...] the lake starts shouting at you about how the fork you're using is being unfair to the oil - that you're being too unwelcoming to the oil and not treating it properly, completely ignoring the fact that you've been using a fork and have been asking for better tools for years. The lake slaps you anyway.
In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems. However, I haven't been on the site for a while and so I couldn't tell you whether they are actually having a meaningful impact or just making more empty promises.