It's precisely hindsight. It seems harsh to blame the dev who wrote the query for the death of the business. It makes good copy on reddit; funny, and sticky, but harsh. That stuff is bad. The dev should feel bad. But, was that the root cause for the failure; was it even a proximate cause? None of this was teased out satisfactorily in the original piece. All the tech silliness at the failed companies was presented as being both necessary and sufficient for the failures. I feel that there may have been _something_ else, but you'd never know from the original post.