It might be better to say that they failed last night and leave a more general judgment open.
It's a good thing that people are calling this out and giving the participants cause to reflect on the problems with that kind of conversation (along with the rest of us). But I think it's also good if we don't rush to reduce people to some of their meaner moments. A lot of the participants have done a number of good things in the past, and they may well apologize and make this the exception rather than the rule.
I was being pithy. I don't mean to suggest that they're awful people.
I think in the open source community there's an ugly culture of celebrating people that act like jerks about technical things that reasonable people could disagree on (the poster child of that probably being Linus). I don't think that's a useful culture to have around. I think the best way to get rid of that culture is to make clear that those people can go fuck themselves. Just because you can be a dick doesn't mean you should, and the community should reflect that.
I'm not the positivity police, I don't think people should be nice just for the sake of being nice, but there's no reason to go pick on someone's project just because it does something you'd rather do with another tool.
So you ascribe personal, leveled, directed malevolence directly against Heather Arthur and her replacer library to their actions? You don't think it had anything to do with just doing it for kicks, anything to do with how people see Node?
I'd say these guys fail that test.