This is not a free speech issue under your (one true and only correct) definition of free speech.
Imagine a bully goes up to a citizen and tells them to be quiet about, say, potholes on their street because if they don't "it would be unfortunate should you and your spouse lose your jobs and your professional reputations destroyed".
In this analogy, there is no threat of violence. Nothing the bully said was illegal as far as I can tell. But when a bystander looks at this and says it's wrong and unethical for a bully to do that, guys like you crawl out of the woodwork and start yelling about Free Speech rights of the bully. But we're not talking about Free Speech rights. We're talking about the ethics of mobilizing the social media mob to destroy people's lives, frequently over nothing other than vague innuendo. As far as I know in any of these situations, no laws are broken, and yet, there is something deeply wrong here.
Here's another example: Because we are living through a kind of a mass hysteria moment, the similarity to 'Salem witch trials' is quite striking. In that case, teenage girls accused hundreds of people of witchcraft and consequently those people would be ostracized and their lives destroyed (for the sake of argument, let's ignore the small number of people who were put to death because we would both agree that is wrong on another level). If someone highlights this as a major issue, do you go out, frothing at the mouth, and yell about free speech rights of the teenage girls? Isn't that missing the entire point?
>It's her freedom of speech to do so, so long as it's actually true as opposed to defamation.
The irony in all this is you didn't even bother reading the article ... or the HN headline. She did defame Andreessen because she maliciously and malevolently asserted something that he said, that he didn't say (when called out about it she fell back on 'well, it was male voice' which was another lie).
But even if he said this 'r-word' in context of explaining the WSB phenomena, this malevolent 'reporter' is doing the same thing as the Salem teenage girls did when they accused others of witchcraft. In this case, she's accusing Andreessen of blaspheming against holy tenants of wokeism in order to paint him as a bigot so the mob will do the rest. Why? So that his public image and professional reputation would be destroyed and maybe she gets a higher profile and a raise. When people point out this is wrong, you yell about Free Speech.