I mean, I'm the kind of guy to obsessively worry about diplomacy in professional communications, and my first impulse still would have been to respond with "no"

I mean, I'm the kind of guy to obsessively worry about diplomacy in professional communications, and my first impulse still would have been to respond with "no" and close the issue, so as far as I'm concerned, he's well ahead of the curve. I really don't want to put the question-asker on blast, because software is hard, and sometimes you're trapped in a quagmire and just need to fire out a question, but I'm not sure how many ways there are to respond to 'is it safe to push the button labeled "don't push this button, it's unsafe to push it, it's bad to push it, please don't push it, dear God just don't"?' Time is finite and some questions just aren't very good questions. When I feel the need to contact developers about their code, I tend to think long and hard about whether them responding to my question is a good use of their time. I feel very uncomfortable making requests of others' time frivolously, and asking "is it safe to use this field in production?" would have made me feel as if I was making a fairly brazen demand to address what is ultimately a self-answering question. I probably would have spent some time thinking "is there something different and more useful that I can ask instead?" In this regard, Dan Ambramov did a good job, as far as I can tell, of iterating and eliciting a useful, actionable feature request from the question-asker. He converted what could have been a negative interaction for both parties into something that potentially improves the project, and it's hard to ask for too much more.