With that said, I thought that the article's title was kind of ironic because in my opinion, the intersectional identity politics espoused by the authors is itself one of the most toxic aspects of contemporary tech culture. It's the part of working at a mature venture-funded startup in SV that I miss the least, by far.
B) Would you be willing to clarify what was toxic about your experience with SV startups as you described?
C) Realistically, without denying the problems which probably do exist with "intersectionaly identity politics", etc, it seems pretty clear (as in there are studies, etc) that sexual harassment is one of the most toxic aspects, not only of tech, but of contemporary business and American life. Discrimination based on the color of one's skin is up there as well. So it does seem a bit disingenuous to point out the flaws in ways in which people are trying to ameliorate these problems without acknowledging the problems themselves, and/or to imply that said flaws are more pervasive than the damaging behaviors which they are a response to.
Should it not be to judge people by the output of their work relative to their working conditions?
I'm much more interested in hiring someone who operated 5 servers in a culture of manual configuration over ssh by introducing automation than someone who operated 500 servers by following existing procedures and using Ansible playbooks that they didn't contribute any improvements to, even though the second person produced quite a bit more output.
(If by "output" you mean to count in this way, then sure, but a lot of people don't—for instance, lots of people want to see GitHub activity without asking whether the previous employer had onerous IP rules, or the candidate has a family they're busy with on evenings and weekends, or whatever.)