> Are you trying to imply this was some kind of a real thing that happened?
I won't speak for GP, but it was very clearly a real thing (no "some kind of" qualifier necessary) that actually did happen.
I observed it to happen.
I observed it to negatively affect people I personally met and cared about.
I observed the creation of entire subreddits dedicated to the application of the technique, such as r/byebyejob which today has 650 thousand subscribers.
Wikipedia recognizes that it has happened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture). (And this is despite that I would generally consider Wikipedia's coverage of political and cultural topics to be biased against me.)
I have been observing it for over a decade, longer than it had a name (if Wikipedia is to be believed, anyway — although of course one should naturally expect "cancelling" to have existed for longer than the "culture" around it). For just one example completely off the top of my head, consider the case of Dr. Matt Taylor, who was browbeaten into apologizing for wearing a shirt (which was a gift from a female friend) deemed "sexist" (for depicting women in outfits that wouldn't be out of place in a general-audience comic book) and further harassed after apologizing. I followed this story closely as it happened.
Aside from that, if you disagree with someone else about facts, please speak plainly. Phrasing like yours implies a level of disdain and disrespect that is well outside my understanding of how discourse is expected to work on HN.
