I don't think you're being cynical, but I do think everyone (including the author of the article) might be looking at the past through rose colored glasses.

People are not always kind on mailing lists, and that can turn a lot of people off from software.

Theo De Raadt forked OpenBSD from NetBSD specifically because of personality clashes iirc.

You can also take a look at Eric Raymond's "How to ask questions the smart way" http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html and find little bits of passive aggressiveness and misanthropy.

I submit that open source has always been a mix of competition and cooperation in almost equal parts. That the only real change here has been that the number of active users in the open source realm has grown.

Also I have issues with this:

needlessly fragmenting the program and its userbase as a whole so they can get their 15 minutes of fame and satisfied delusions of grandeur

I don't care if someone forks software as long as the license permits it. Why would I? If you don't want someone to be able to do that, relicense it! There isn't much fragmentation when a fork is created, and usually unmaintained software will be given up on in the short future.