It bothers me that the article seems imply there is only minimal truth and wasting a ton of time. > What it means in practice is that your colleague can write

It bothers me that the article seems imply there is only minimal truth and wasting a ton of time. > What it means in practice is that your colleague can write "this approach is wrong, here's why" instead of "hey, hope you're doing well, I had some time to look at your PR and I just wanted to shared a few small thoughts, please take these as just one perspective, and of course you know the codebase better than I do, but I was wondering if maybe we could potentially consider [useful thing here]" and then bury the actual point six paragraphs deep. Both messages contain the same information, however one of them respects time. There's a LARGE grey area between those two. It's entirely possible to value someone's emotions _and_ not waste a bunch of time. And yes, other people's emotional reactions to what you say _should_ matter to you. Because 1) empathy matters and 2) you need to continue working with those people. It's a pretty widely held belief that the people are say "I'm not being mean, I'm just stating the truth; I'm a straight shooter" and, in fact, just jerks.