I've seen this exact attitude before. It's always interesting to me when a developer like this announces huge changes exclusively through a channel that it turns out most of their users aren't even aware of.
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The very first mention of "spider" on that Discord was already the release announcement of a version containing it and got negative reactions: https://i.imgur.com/gLKce8W.png
I skimmed through the dev's messages prior to that (not many) and couldn't find anything else related.
I believe "I made an announcement to poll people's reaction" is intentionally deceptive wording to imply they made a poll beforehand, but they're actually just referring to the release announcement. Same with "There were very little comments" which misses out the fact that all those comments were negative, and there were few comments primarily because it's a small unknown Discord server.
As I see it the dev asked the void and got no negative feedback.
Afterwards the void grew legs and started running after him