I've had my share of battles on WP to preserve content that was dismissed as fringe by people who didn't understand what they were looking at (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2...).

The author you mentioned may not have met the inclusion criteria at the time, or maybe you had the misfortune to fall on a zealous admin who gets dopamine kicks from that kind of behavior. That being said, if a cursory Google search was enough to establish notability, it shouldn't have taken much time and effort to add links to reliable sources and save the article.

WP is very sensitive regarding inclusion criteria for biographies of living persons, because of the flood of vanity submission they have to filter out. The notability criteria are not perfect, but the provide a good enough balance to limit the spam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...).

In my experience, toxic behavior isn't as rewarded as it was on SO, and there are venues to discuss issues.