He's asking how OP (and you?) think this is different from Poland in 1939. Regardless of whether or not you agree, do you understand the parallel being drawn?
I think the "pearls being clutched" are that you have a great general point but are suggesting something strange. A role model is someone you want people to imitate. We want people to get his message, not to just do the same thing.
Sacrifices like this should always be super rare. If he's inspiring others to action, then it should be mass protests (at least), not more immolations.
Part of the reason this is a great example is you can easily calculate the maximum stress of an I-beam IFF you know where to find the simple formula. Even a dense FEA mesh will always give an answer like 3x4=11.9974, it's worse. The education is how you know which formula to use.
I'm more of a mechanical engineer than a coder, and for me it's been super helpful writing the code. The rest of our repo is clear enough that even I can understand what it actually does by just reading it. What I'm unfamiliar with are the syntax, and which nifty things our libraries can do.
So if you kinda understand programs but barely know the language, then it's awesome. The actual good programmers at my company prefer a minimal working example to fix over a written feature request. Then they replace my crap with something more elegant.
He's asking how OP (and you?) think this is different from Poland in 1939. Regardless of whether or not you agree, do you understand the parallel being drawn?