As a native New Yorker I resemble that remark :-)

I will say the opposite can also be frustrating. People conflate niceness with kindness or even worse, morality. Being gruff isn’t intrinsically immoral. Being super “nice” isn’t intrinsically moral.

This might sound like some sort of rationalization for bad behavior, but I don’t think so. When you optimize you have to have at minimum a hierarchy of optimization goals. At some point, one goal WILL conflict with another. This means that conflating niceness with morality will inevitably lead to misguided and immoral/unethical behavior.