It's true that there will be some false negatives. I basically have to go with my gut that if I get a certain strength of a vibe I have to interpret it some way. In one case it was one of the top senior devs interviewing me and didn't like the terms I was using or pronouncing them and seemed to be somewhat hung up on it. I considered that trivial and was trying to get to the meat of the discussion. I took that as a cue for the engineering culture, how would you interpret it?

Fair points though I was really only replying to your comment here, not the article any longer. I do agree that the article seems to "overanalyze" the situation, potentially there was literally nothing and he gave the 'wrong answer' for no good reason at all. Makes a nice article though I guess. FWIW I have experience with giving the "hard truth" in the "wrong situation" and I've come out unscathed, because I was very objectively correct and there was no way around it. Nothing pedantically debatable in my case, just "this is how the protocol works, not the way you say, no interpretation possible, look it up in the RFC". Not the actual example but like someone saying it's "SYN, ACK, ACK ACK" instead of "SYN, SYN ACK, ACK".

Companies can be large and in that case it's likely you will be encountering a fair number of people you won't like while there anyway. The question is whether you interview with "random interviewer of the day" (still bad if that's a bad apple but if the company is large you might take your chances while if the company is small, it's likely this is 'their best' or you will work closely with this person) or if you're actually interviewing with the team members you'll work with. If the company is large but you know you are interviewing with the team members you'll be working with and the feeling just isn't there or worse, then I think I'd take the possible false positive if I wasn't in a bind for a job.

At my current place for example I interviewed with a bunch of people in various rounds, from the typical HR stuff at the front, through various layers from CTO, my boss, our architect and then a sample of people from my immediate team. All of them very pleasant, had the best interview experience ever with the architect. We had a great discussion of pros and cons of various choices I made for the code I had to write, alternative approaches etc. Really awesome. Felt basically like a regular working session, no leetcode quizzing BS.

Previously I have interviewed with other companies where it just became clear after some time that the company and I were on very different terms with regards to how we think software development should work. A different interviewer might have been able to 'hide' some of it and I might have joined that company and been miserable.