Transphobes think all trans people are scary rapist men looking for a way past the impenetrable magic barrier that only lets women into women’s toilets, and that there’s no reason anyone would want to go into the men’s toilets, so trans men are fictional and don’t need or want any rights, just like the law doesn’t give rights to elves and hobgoblins.
It’s not guaranteed that it’s interpreted as a platitude by the person it’s directed at, and when the mismatch between the task and the work done is big enough to make it obviously a platitude, it’s just patronising, and risks being more insulting than not saying it at all.
The feedback in the article was obviously far from perfect, but from the sound of it, “good attempt” could be an actively harmful thing to say. Lots of effort had gone into making the wrong thing and making it fragile, which isn’t good at all, it’s bad. If you’d asked an employee to make a waterproof diving watch, and they came back with a mechanical clock made from sugar, even though it’s impressive that they managed to make a clock from sugar, it’s completely inappropriate as it’d stop working the instant it got wet. You wouldn’t want to encourage that kind of thing happening again by calling it good, and it’s incompatible enough with the brief that acknowledging it as an attempt to fit the brief is giving too much credit - someone who can do that kind of sugar work must know it’s sensitive to moisture.
The manager can apologise for not checking in sooner before so much time had been spent on something unsuitable and for failing to communicate the priorities properly, and acknowledge the effort and potential merit in another situation without implying it was good to sink time into something unfit for purpose without double checking something complicated was genuinely necessary.
The Free Software movement was generally a leftist objection to the limitations on computer use that capitalism was causing, and the open source movement was a pro-corporate offshoot to try and make the obvious benefits more compatible with capitalism (which it’s been pretty successful at, even if it has reintroduced some of the problems Free Software was trying to stop in the first place). Anyone who’s making a distinction between the two at the minimum is recognising that capitalism is why we can’t have certain specific nice things, so it’s not a huge leap to blame it for other problems, too.
As for a sensible middle ground, the Free Software movement designed its licences to work in the capitalist societies they operated in, so the incompatibility with corporate use has never been as big a deal as it’s been made out to be. Corporations can use copyleft-licenced software just fine as long as they’re not unreasonable about it. It’s totally fine for a corporation to use a GPL tool internally and even have an internal fork as long as they put the source code for their internal fork on the company’s file share so the employees using the tool can improve it if they get the urge. They can even sell products that depend on LGPL or MPL libraries if they make the source of the builds of those libraries they used available on their website or otherwise accessible to their customers (and use a DLL/.so/.dylib build of the library of it’s LGPL). These restrictions are all less of a pain than making an MIT-licenced clone of an existing project, but companies have opted to make clones instead. The only bonus this gives them is that they can make it proprietary again later, and it has the added risk that one of their competitors could make a proprietary fork with a killer feature they can charge for, which isn’t a nice risk. There are other benefits to investing in making your own clone of something, but they don’t depend on the license it uses.
That kind of bioplastic tends not to biodegrade naturally, instead requiring a heated industrial composter with specially engineered enzymes added. If it’s disposed of properly, it’s great, otherwise it’s no better than traditional plastic but costs more. Also, not all bioplastics biodegrade at all as all the word means is that the source material is biomass rather than oil.