Second, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." (also in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
Third, punishing users for discussing something work-related is one of the worst things you can do to damage this place. We want knowledgeable comments, and for most people, our work is what we know the most about. Disincentivizing that is a losing proposition (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=...) so please don't.
As for the extremely disappointing asshole comment, coming from a moderator is quite frankly astounding. "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith".
They did all three of those in the space of a few minutes (if you were checking their status page - which you can subscribe to by the way).
I agree with you, but Cloudflare seem to have done exactly what you're describing in this instance?