I'm not familiar with this definition in any modern or archaic sense. Is there somewhere I can read about it? Just because a decision is not directly engineering related (which I'm not even convinced this is) doesn't mean that it's not thoughtful.
Regardless, the decision was 99% logical. In fact, even the emotional parts are laudable. For example, I love software. That's an emotion. If you disagree with that foundation, we will fundamentally never be able to converse with each other about what's best for software.
Neither of these can be replaced by an automated test suite of any kind, and all of these are examples of good engineering practices that guarantee software quality.
Additionally, even if you don't (need to) adhere to the best engineering practices and instead rely solely on an automated test suite, the tests in this suite must be validated - read and understood - by a human in order to guarantee that they nail down the correct requirements.
Fear (emotion) is used (advantageously) to force us to check that something isn't going to break us
In this instance fear is being used to ensure that yt-dlp is not exposed to (genuine) concerns about the quality of bun that is openly being built making use of tools we as a whole know is problematic.
I agree with you that the statements are a bit over the top (that's an emotional response to their statements btw) and that (eventually) you would /hope/ that bun gets to a point where it's got some genuine reliability from a users perspective.
Edit: I see your edit to explain that the issue is ideology - but unfortunately (perhaps) that's not an improved stance - ideology has to guide us when we just don't know - it's a heuristic.
I think it's fair to call me out for skipping a step, but I wasn't using it to mean "idea I don't agree with".
I believe, maliciously or innocently, you were.