The reporter read about it and thought, with what's going on in Syria, Afghanistan, etc. that it'd be a good use of column-inches to yammer on about a "war" that was never going to escalate into an armed conflict.
Especially as the guideline is clearly there so as not to give users the misleading impression that the app's crashed. That's obviously not the case when a vim user is using the expected command to close the program.
You have to understand that all those years ago, Microsoft occupied the position Google does now - if they did or announced anything at all, it was obviously sinister in the eyes of a lot of geeks.