Carmack is a hero for me but he seems to come across as very naive here. I employ other people now and employees who argue this sort of stuff isn't copying are toxic to the culture and ethics of work. When you are paid a salary every month, I actually don't care if you are productive. But the least I expect you to be is loyal. And I am no monster for expecting that.
The loyalty you receive will be proportional to the loyalty you demonstrate. When I am paid a salary every month, my expectation is that I am being paid for services rendered, and that what I am paid is a fraction of the value I produced. There is no loyalty demonstrated there; it's just business.
As the company I work for now had in the past kicked me to the curb with only 3 days of notice and no severance whatsoever, I don't feel particularly loyal to them. But I'm still doing their work [again], and they are paying me salary for it [again]. I'm just a worker bee to them, and they're just a mealticket to me. It works out fine as long as I sleep with one eye open.
The instant I can secure a better deal for me, I will pack up my personal possessions and go. I won't take a few weeks to wrap things up in a neat little package. I'll just turn in my badges and walk out. I will stop caring about the company that used to pay my salary on the day I get my last paycheck from them. I know they never cared about me; they only ever cared about my work product.
In practice, in the real world, US employees won't be loyal, because US companies have in aggregate treated them like fungible resources, rather than people. The instant they are no longer profitable to keep, they are fired. So it isn't the employees that are polluting the workplace culture. The employers will eventually be hoist on their own collective petard, but it isn't as though the rest of us will come away clean from that disaster to bask in our schadenfreude, either.
It's nice that you think that temporarily supporting unproductive employees until things turn back around is good business practice, but you're sort of swimming against the tide. I started my career with a small measure of loyalty, but a series of disloyal acts has conditioned me to instead be strictly mercenary. You're no monster, but you shouldn't expect that other employers are anywhere near your level of cooperation with their employees.