The writer is assuming a powerful left-brain empathy that is characteristic of hackers ("I'd lay better odds that he’s paying attention, watching your actions and reactions to build a mental model of how it’s safe to interact with you."), yet is lacking in the invaders. The invaders are running a much simpler hardwired social strategy that assumes everyone is like them (even in response, there are plenty of comments insisting that hackers still unconsciously judge people by race in spite of most of our judgments being formed before we ever see someone. it's simple projection), and are not setup to understand those who are different. They cannot change, and consequently we will lose the social game of chicken every time.
What I'd really like to see/find/create/sustain is a community of people that are able to resist being distracted by the narrow trap of the social hierarchy - VC money, PR articles from companies, status-quo politics, proprietary Appoogle product/tech announcements, mass media human interest stories, etc. More similar to the Internet I grew up with, where objective technical merit was the ideal to strive towards, and being told to RTFM resulted in someone learning how to self-learn and ask intelligent questions rather than getting attention from writing clickbait on how they were offended. Maybe this is impossible because we've gotten too big/connected, or I personally could just be pitifully stuck in the rut that is HN and myopic from falling out of more specific technical tribes.
Maybe this is impossible and any such community is ultimately doomed to entryism. But articles such as this that take a stab at reifying the qualities of true hackerdom are necessary for us to reflect and understand exactly what is being lost and perhaps come up with ways to defend it in the large, rather than it surviving solely in narrow highly-technical communities.
(PS - a point i wanted to make elsewhere in the thread about the general article, but I will do here instead because it applies to my comment as well:
It is easy to phrase this issue in in binary us-vs-them hacker or not-a-hacker terms but the reality is continuous. So while it is nice to think in simpler terms, the topic is actually graver because any of us can be corrupted by social influences as well. The lure of wider acceptance, attention, fame, and/or money can lead us down the path of behavior that we despise - outrage fanning, user-disempowering platforms, working on surveillance tech, etc. The status quo's siren's song is becoming quite apparent right now as the (de)centralization pendulum starts to swing back and the trajectories of companies further diverge from those of free people.)