The blog is useless. I read the Github discussion on the pull request and the revert. Here's what happened:
1. A pull request containing only two very minor changes to comments in the source code was made.
2. Mr. Noordhuis rejected the pull request with a terse "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
3. A flamewar erupts about the appropriateness and neccessity of the singular "they". Mr. Noordhuis is not participating in the flamewar.
4. The pull request is forced through while the flamewar rages on.
5. Mr. Noordhuis reverts the forced landing on the grounds that it violated project policy. The revert immediately begins to accumulate a fair number of hostile comments.
6. The flamewar intensifies. Allegations are made about Mr. Noordhuis's character.
7. A joyent employee, acting in an official role and using Joyent's official blog, decided to write and publish a text about how Mr. Noordhuis is sexist and would've gotten fired from Joyent on the spot, indirectly calling Mr. Noordhuis an asshole in the process. Joyent, by not taking the text down, implicitly endorses it.
8. Mr. Noordhuis posts into the discussion to point out that the rejection/revert had been made on purely procedural grounds. He simultaneously announces that he will leave the project, which I can fully understand.
After that the flame war goes on. Some people actually point out that Joyent's behavior is highly unprofessional, which the Joyent employee disregards because "'Fired' isn't a gendered word that has larger social ramifications that careless use of pronouns does." So yes; according to Joyent, publicly calling someone so sexist that they would've been fired on the spot is less bad than using "he" in a gender-neutral role. (Bonus points for one woman in the discussion calling the whole thing a "witch burning". For the record, she was also the one person to offer a solution instead of flaming about pronouns.)
If IBM and Oracle worked remotely like that they'd be up to their ears in wrongful termination suits. And libel suits. And, depending on whether insults are an actionable offense in the relevant jurisdiction, suits about that too.
The sad thing is that early on someone offered a perfectly reasonable way of resolving the situation: Mandating the singular "they" in the project's coding guidelines and then floating changes to existing code until they can be mixed in with other refactoring commits. Of course it was completely ignored.
(For the record, I am a proponent of singular-they and I still think that the term "social justice warriors" with all its negative connotations entirely applies here. Many of the people involved completely went off the rails as soon as the pull request was rejected and immediately assumed Mr. Noordhuis to be a moustache-twirling antifeminist villain.)