This is a very common trope: claim to have dog-level hearing for detecting what people really mean. Very often, including likely this time, it's totally inaccurate, and just means no discussion can be done as one of the parties relentlessly ad hominems the other.
> since Reagan fired the PATCO ATC workers
Can you cite this?
It took 10 years after Reagan fired the controllers to get the workforce back to pre-1981 levels. This caused a ripple effect because the people that were hired were around the same age. The result was the FAA had to deal with large sections of the ATSC workforce retiring at 56(the legal maximum for an air traffic controller) in bunches. The FAA has struggled since this to maintain adequate staffing levels due to high stress nature of the job.
> The staffing issue at FAA dates back to 1981 when air traffic controllers went on strike and President Reagan fired them en masse. Subsequent hiring created a retirement wave around 2005 that the agency has long struggled to address.
The retirement wave just means that they didn't hire to plan for succession properly. That's not a union task. And many presidents have come and gone between Reagan and now; it seems strange not to mention that and talk as though he set in motion an unswervable chain of events.