Perhaps unsurprisingly, this falls down on several points. It's just a disgusting way to talk about your fellow human beings when it's your own failures tripping you up. I imagine this is a cognitive limitation directly related to their own empathic limitations.
In conversations about AI, people usually want changed behavior and similar concrete shifts. Empathy is viewed as a lever to produce those changes. When the changes are not forthcoming, the conclusion people reach is that clearly it's because the emotional experience of empathy isn't happening. This avoids considering awkward and unpleasant questions such as if there may be other good reasons why those changes are not forthcoming from a person who may be experiencing sincere and genuine empathy.
I spent a lot of years as a professional software engineer. Many of those left me daily on the receiving end of people for whom calling on the empathy of others was their preferred means of shaping behavior. I had to learn to set aside those emotions in order to preserve my own judgment. Now I see, daily, the same kind of people deploring that the tools they taught me to resist are not working.
What I see in this blog post is someone relating a story in which an awkward encounter is anonymized. The anonymization is itself a form of empathy in action - the person is not called out specifically, only the conversation. There's plenty of room to criticize the author in what is presented, but we really have no idea who missed what cues in that conversation. It's not a kind comment on either person.
