alt Hacker News> In other words, they had been dissatisfied with the whole rationalist way of arguing for a while; and this was the point where they finally felt like "This is actually just a game of words; and it's a dumb one I don't want to play any more."
That would make sense, except for the first paragraph mentioning that the Bankman-Fried thing and the Zizian murder thing didn't prompt them to write it. Both were long _after_ the Damore thing. The strong implication of the first paragraph was that there was some _new_ breaking point, but that's quite an old one.
My interpretation was that the Damore thing was the threshold where the author finally stopped identifying as a "rationalist". After that point, they considered several times writing a post describing that event. The first time they thought about writing it was "in the mid-2010s", which would like up with the Damore incident. Observing people who have given up Christianity, there's almost always a time gap between the time they stop identifying / participating with Christianity and the time they discuss it publicly.
You're right, there's nothing to indicate why they are writing now, when they actively resisted writing after SBF or the Zizians. Perhaps part of them felt like writing in response to those things would be unfair; perhaps part of them knew they weren't ready, and now they are.
Or maybe they know about some new scandal that's going to come to light in the next few months!