HN user
Between the red text on all their sites and this settlement, I'd say things did handle themselves.
The employee and jealous ex even made up, got married, and have children now.
Everybody lived happily ever after.
Once upon a time, I found this company's software on an employee's work laptop, installed by a jealous ex-boyfriend.
I called the company, and they refused to remove our data or even help with uninstalling the software without a court order.
The software helpfully logged the URL when it saved screenshots to S3, which it did every few seconds.
The S3 bucket was fully public, listable, readable, writable. It also contained keylogging and other data.
Not just from our employee. From everyone.
From my perspective, it's the article calling your work bullshit: if the author thought it was interesting on its own merits, they wouldn't have to lead with the age of the creator.
I would bet that OP was once themselves the recipient of similar "breathless gushing" when they were young, and lost a lot of the wind in their sails when formerly impressive achievements became simply expected. Better not to depend on that kind of validation, it stops early and never comes back.
And worse, someday you might read articles like this and feel discouraged, because it seems nobody will care that you just discovered how much fun you can have with Markov chains in your 30s.