Using power to force one's own view because one can is a problematic behavior in open source projects. It needlessly costs contributors. And respect.
Ben was forcing the view that the commit policy had not been followed, which is a view that the rest of the community agrees with. This all got blown out of control when someone misinterpreted Ben's actions and started a bikeshedding tempest in a teacup instead of figuring out why Ben considered it a trivial change.
I don't know about you, but everyone who went off the deep end in that thread basically joined a lynch mob based on misunderstanding and failure to seek clarification for the commit reversion. The burden was on those who were upset to seek clarification instead of brandishing pitchforks and torches.
I don't think anyone who has contributed to the NodeJS repo joined because they wanted to bikeshed over gender issues. I'd be surprised if anyone (other than the author of the commit that started all this) joined to commit with that as a primary intent (or secondary, tertiary, etc.).
That's the same view you're trying to force here. But at least Noordhuis has the virtue of possibly believing that. You clearly don't; you've got 9 dismissive, rage-y comments on this article. That's not how people react to trivia, which you were helpful enough to define as of little importance.
I think you correctly recognize the topic, which is the politics of gender inclusion, as important. It's just that you disagree with the people who proposed and support this change. I'd rather you were honest enough to say that, rather than trying to get us to swallow the notion that this this totally unimportant thing is totally important.
The project was never gender exclusive. The comments could have easily used the pronouns she instead of he. Whoever wrote the comment chose he for whatever reason. Had someone else who has a different gender pronoun preference written the code being commented on, then it would have been different. It doesn't really matter because it's irrelevant to the purpose of the project.
Yes, I disagree with people wasting the committer's time with something that simply does not matter. Pronouns don't matter. He, she, it, user, dog, cat, lamp. If it's not code or comments that further clarify the code in question who cares because it simply does not matter. Knowing or not knowing the gender of the example user in the comment doesn't change anything about the code. Were we really supposed to believe that it was only going to send the nsent flag is the user is male and that we are not sending the flag if the user is female.
People should either code or not code, but they should not pretend to contribute with trivial pull requests that have been one huge net negative addition to the project due to the shitstorm kicked up. That's all the original pull request has accomplished ... one big massive net negative addition to the community. What an excellent way to make your point and endear people with your cause. I hope they are happy with the turd they left in the pool.
You know what statistic I would love to see. Lines of code contributed by those who think the change is trivial versus those that think it is not trivial. That's the only worthwhile objective measure of "important" that really matters. I bet you that the conversation on that PR is actually really really short once you eliminate everyone who has never contributed a pull request.
If gender-inclusive language in comments is deemed important, then it ought to be treated as important from the contributor side. For example, "comments must all be gender neutral" should have been incorporated into the coding standard for the project, along with a rationale, and the existing code should have been vetted for all uses of gendered pronouns. That would have made for a more serious contribution, and I bet Noordhuis would have treated it differently.
The view that the improvement to the documentation text was trivial.
In Ben's own words:
"... Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes
because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You
have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less
effective, etc."
I would expect the overwhelming majority of people who have been committers of a large active open-source project to have done what Ben did. It's called triaging and it is in the overall best interest of the community.