"Also, you can't blame the shitstorm on the person
submitting the pull request."
Why not? You can't unilaterally decide that that person cannot be to blame here.
They could have made a contribution of utility (bugfix or feature for example) and included that minor comment change within that pull request, instead of using a pull request as their own personal soapbox. Github issues and pull requests are not forums for debating the politics of gender issues. As someone who had never once submitted a prior pull request with utility to libuv, Alex Gaynor should have made his change silently as part of a bugfix or feature and moved along. His behavior was antisocial.
Or as an alternative, he could have privately emailed an existing contributor, discussed the change, and got support. If it had come from Isaac or Bert to start with, it would have sailed through without objection.
I really feel like a pull request was the wrong vehicle for what the original submitter was trying to accomplish.
If open-source projects adopt an "email first before pull request" approach, I think that's a big mistake. That will mean a lot of dialog with people who aren't actually going to do the work, and a lot of missed patch opportunities from people who have done or will do the work but are put off by the uncertainty of a policy like that.
Regardless, if a pull request is the wrong vehicle, then the correct response isn't, "Request rejected! Go away." It's "Let's talk about this more." It was a two-line change that made the project better. (At least, nobody has so far claimed that the gender-exclusive language was better.) I think that's enough of a positive signal to be worth following up on, and certainly not the dire insult that some believe it to be.
Ok. If it's not a policy, then I don't think there's any way you can expect a potential contributor to know that a particular pull request must be preceded by discussion. In which case, I think the burden falls on the person reviewing the requests. In this case, Noordhuis. The submitter did their bit by making a positive change and offering the patch.
They could have made a contribution of utility (bugfix or feature for example) and included that minor comment change within that pull request, instead of using a pull request as their own personal soapbox. Github issues and pull requests are not forums for debating the politics of gender issues. As someone who had never once submitted a prior pull request with utility to libuv, Alex Gaynor should have made his change silently as part of a bugfix or feature and moved along. His behavior was antisocial.