I've sent quite a few FOI requests myself when I was a reporter, and my experience biases me against thinking there's a significant problem of state employees sending out FOIAs quickly/prematurely out of fear. In fact, I've never dealt with an employee who broke protocol -- for non-routine requests, the vast majority of them consult with their FOI officer/legal counsel. And they have no incentive to rush things because most FOI laws allow for a delay in response time -- Washington's law doesn't even have a set time limit in which the government has to respond.
> The point is that individual people feel pressure and make decisions based on these articles
That is literally the situation of every public servant -- as just about any police officer will tell you. The difference with FOI is that the law provides ample protection for government employees to take their time to get it right, and every investigative journalist I've ever worked with puts up with those delays -- it's only when the delay goes into months/years such that it's tantamount to a rejection that legal action is threatened, because the lawsuit itself takes months to resolve.
The only example lawsuits you've found were ones in which the agencies refused to fulfill the request. Until you can show a single instance in which a state employee, or even an agency, was punished because they were late while trying to respond in good faith, I don't think we should assume you know what you're talking about when you claim the author has "no background/understanding" of WA's public records laws.
It's especially absurd that you're trying to argue that the mistake the city of Seattle made in his case was done out of hurried fear, when the author provides correspondence that shows he and the city emailed back-and-forth from April to August before they sent him the data. A technical screwup (via internal miscommunication) is the most plausible explanation by far, as no one in the IT or FOI office had any reason to rush this request.