To be honest in my experience a lot of people tend to be kind of vindictive. See some of the responses to the Linux bogus patch research for example, with people calling for things like "destroy their careers". That seems a bit overly vindictive to me; yes, they screwed up and yes, there should probably some consequences. But destroying the entire career of a 20-something? Sjeez...
I've gotten death threats over email because ... reasons? These are of course entirely hollow threats, and it's easy to just shrug them off as "assholes internet crazies", but there's no reason you can't be crazy or an asshole and have a successful career.
Add to this that a lot of these people put a lot of hard work in these kind of comparatively small businesses and that criticising the company feels like an attack on you ... and you end up with this.
The difference, as you say, is that most of us aren't actually in a position to enact these kind of things.
Maybe there's also some bias towards certain personality types, I don't know.
