I'm not going to bother reading the article, but title reveals wrong mentality. It should be replaced with: "What it's like to pursue a dream for 30 years (among pursuing other dreams), then deciding it failed and then stopping the pursuing and not pursuing any more." 1) Failure is never absolute. 2) Every situation is relative. Apple opened their first shop when Compaq closed their last. 3) Absolute terms, like doing something for 30 years is misleading. It's generalising and it's not objective.
To give you some context, I'm coding lots email templates for living and on daily basis we're dealing with Outlook 2016 bugs some of which are as old as IE5. Yes, Internet Explorer five. For example, if you have a TD less than 18px high, it will be push to be 18px high, unless there's font-size set. These kinds of bugs were squished on IE6. Hatred to Internet Explorer was one of the main reasons devs hated M$. Now, IE is gone, web devs live happy lives with React and us, email devs still code in tables and use VML hacks just to set background picture (ahem, of a table cell).
With the above context, I'd say M$ may be different now compared to before but it's changing only because it has to and only because they reap what they sow. Previous seeds grew.
Speaking about V$Code, there was so much hatred in GitHub when peeps asked maintainers to allow users to customise the blue status bar that I think I saw true "spirit" of that company. See for yourselves: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/1884 - some juicy posts have been deleted/edited since though
PS. I moved all my 80 Open Source libraries to BitBucket and haven't looked back since. I applaud all others that migrate out of GitHub.
From my experiences, I can distinguish pheromones (or their absence) and any artificial add-ons (like perfume). For example, in my personal preferences' beauty scale, all asian girls are capped to 5/10, no matter how beautiful they are. I studied with many of them and was friends with few and smell-wise, all were incompatible. There is no "negative" body smell, it is just very subtle; weak and strange. Like, imagine vegetables you never ate but they smell strange so you don't want to try them. From other side of spectrum, in my preference scale, black girls, specifically from Caribbean area (Cuba, Brasil, not Africa) are also capped, to 5-6/10. However, all "specimens" I encountered have strange "pull" in the smell and it makes me forget about the cap and flirt and hang with them. I once nearly fell in love with a girl from Brasil who was 6-ish but radiated pheromones like geyser. Smell-wise it was probably a mix of body oil, perspiration and pheromones. Practically, for me, enticing pheromones are as strong as perfumes, but by magnitude more richer. "Negative" body smell/pheromones is weak, strange, yet not off-putting, just strange. That's how smell (in)compatibility manifests to me.