I've never even been to Burning Man, but this is a completely predictable result for anything that reaches any level of popularity.
No system made up of people can scale and maintain its original identity, whether it is a IRL event like Burning Man or a website like reddit or Hacker News. People who were there before some new group will always define an easily identifiable scapegoat group of those who are ruining the thing, but really it is just a numbers game. The more people you add, the less easily identifiable shared culture there can be, the more regulations have to be put into place and the more that community loses what the original members saw as its identity.
I believe this is an immutable, unsolvable problem short of (as devindotcom suggests) breaking off and starting a new new thing that replaces the old new thing (and obviously this is only a temporary solution that will have to be iterated again if the new new thing becomes popular).
That being said, I thought this piece was super awesome for the insight into why tech folks go: it's a great way to show off and build something cool. Probably, folks are motivated by the same reasons my engineer friends back in Saskatchewan build progressively wackier campers to take to Craven Country Jamboree: a little to flex their hacker muscles, a little to blow off steam, a little to fly their freak flags and see who clicks with them. And that's nice. But it's worth noticing that so many pieces of Burner lore are now dependent on being subsidized by really rich folks. If we're being honest about how the economy of Burning Man works, it's becoming less an example of extreme self-reliance and more an example of of extreme patronage on behalf of the really rich.
And in itself, patronage isn't bad at all. It's great! But why doesn't this attitude extend to life back in the city? Why is Burning Man the one place that a rich person can help other folks out? Why is Mark Benioff the one dude who seems to give substantial amounts of money to people in the place he lives?
Burning Man : Silicon Valley :: Gathering of the Juggalos : Rest of America.
Or do you mean it's a camping and music event for Silicon Valley?
(a further-outside-era perspective)