If everyone is always bad regardless if they're trying to change, what incentives would they have from changing at all? It doesn't make any sense.
With online mobs, when the target shows any sort of regret there is blood in the water and the sharks feast. It sometimes turns into a very public form of struggle session for the person under scrutiny. Besides avoiding the faux pas in the first place, one well-tested mitigation is to be absolutely unapologetic and wait for the storm to blow over.
Acknowledgement of mistakes do not invoke much of a mob reaction unless there is wavering, self-pity, or appeals for leniency. Self-preservation should be assumed and not set as a goal -- once you appear to be doing anything that can be thought of as covering up or minimizing or blaming others, the mob will latch on to that and you get no consideration from then on.
The trouble there, of course, is that the motivation for changing (or not changing) one's mind is not always clear, and it's easy to score points from spinning it one way or another.
I'm not convinced that the existence of a low-probability event justifies normalizing the regular occurrence of a much more likely (and negative) event, like a belligerent engineer throwing a fit in a design meeting. I'd go as far as to say I'm open to more people-pleasers in engineering.
Also, fwiw, if you want to know why someone changed their mind, you can just ask them and see how you feel about the answer. If someone changes their mind at the drop of a hat, my guess is that their original position was not a strongly held one.
I thought I made a fairly innocuous point, I don't even think I was talking about engineers specifically.
It’s not particularly relevant (to me as a random non-zig affiliated HN reader) why they right their wrongs, as long as they did it, I find it positive (at least better than if they had left the monkey comments in the post).