I just don't understand how a company the size of Joyent would waste time writing blog posts about pronouns in a code comment. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft blogging about some engineer's code comment in the Windows source code. Nobody cares about that stuff.
As others have pointed out in different comments, Joyent's participation in the whole affair looks like strategic maneuvering against a direct competitor. And if Ben is out at Strongloop (a co-founder of the company as well as being a Node/libuv contributor) then it worked like a charm.
To paraphrase the saying: "don't let a perfectly good crisis go to waste."
There was a lot of activity on Twitter around the commit.
The issue wasn't the pronouns; they were there for a long time without a problem. The issue was that somebody trying to fix them got their pull request closed with "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." It was a jerky move, and a lot of people brought it to Joyent's attention since their name was at the top of the page.
