I think many people who weren't following his art in real time make the reasonable misunderstanding that his works are code and documentation participating in the vast human project of Open Source Software, since they tended to have names like "_why's (poignant) guide to ruby" and not more descriptive names like "cartoon foxes and how mad I reacted in front of my expanded family that time when my mom said my sister uses cocaine and how she didn't end up killing herself and stuff like that and some ruby code".
I mean, he did write some widely used open source. I think the most popular yaml parser? And an html parser or generator or something that some people were still using but most already moved to another one inspired by it? And there was a community around projects like Camping and Shoes?
So less-involved people judged him like they judged the left-pad guy (which, I mean, was in his full right to remove all his code from npm, but was a bit unkind to the vast community of left-pad dependent day-job developers).
But almost everything he did was 99% art, and his persona shared a lot of things you might not want your boss or mom to read, so I think he should be judged more like Kafka requesting his books to be burned.
Camping and Shoes were also 99% art, and I think nobody who was actively part of their communities was very much hurt and the sentiment in their communities was more of worrying for his well being.
But he let it be known that he's ok and just wanted to quit so they just let him be.
The outrage was mostly from people reading "popular open source developer deletes his github and vanishes" without context.
And yeah, when I was 16 I used to post on HN and for some stupid reason all my comments began with "Hi, I'm " and it's the most embarrassing thing ever, and Google will never forget...