That would be a fair reaction if the author had stopped as soon as Debian had explained to them why their behaviour was so risky. But they didn't - they went on to do the same thing to Arch.

At that point, it became hard to write it off as mere misguided enthusiasm and LWN were being entirely responsible to write it up in the way they did.

In fact, if you search HN you can see that it's been pushed repeatedly here as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/nordstjern...

There's a pattern of behaviour on display which, though it's not entirely clear if it was intended to be malicious, does end up looking remarkably like a clumsy replay of the Jia Tan attack.

How do you otherwise make an example of shit you dont want in your codebase?

There is an attention cost of pushing unverified slop onto others, public shaming and bans is a valid way to prevent this behaviour.