The question I always want to ask after reading this type of piece is how the author suggests someone should act instead. If the foolishly risky path is to spend below my means, save for the future, improve and diversify my skills, and take care of my body, and the wise, conservative path is to spend almost all my paycheck every month on a house with 3 or 4 totally unused rooms; daily $6/75-fat-gram cups of lard-latte; and a Peloton bike to work off said lard lattes so I can look like what my Men's Fitness or Cosmo cover tells me I should look like, then I'll take the foolishly risky path every time.
I mean, would I be better off right now if I hadn't saved a bunch of money and instead was living paycheck to paycheck with the fear that maybe my job and my industry aren't as black-swan-proof as I once thought they were? In my position, it's mostly irrelevant whether I correctly estimated my future investment returns down to the hundredth decimal place for cFIREsim or whether the 4% rule holds up over the next 35 years. Through working really hard to save and invest money -- and in a way, I should add, that has given me or my spouse very little sense of deprivation at all -- we're in a much, much stronger, more flexible position than we would have been otherwise. So maybe I'll have to get a part-time job 9 years from now to handle an unexpected market downturn. Wow, wouldn't I feel stupid!?
I think where people get confused writing these stories is the distinction between people who are on the path to FIRE and those who have already FIREd. On the path there? We are better off than anyone else, because as you and others have pointed out, we have more savings, lower COL, and a lifestyle that has trained us to believe we have the skills/knowledge to manage a whole bunch of shit that life might throw at us.
OTOH, if you're counting on $40K/yr, you're 35 years old, you just hit $1M, you have very little slop in your budget, and the market suddenly drops 20-30% right after you've FIREd, you're at risk. The few times in which the 4% rule fails all involve large market drops shortly after retirement, so it's reasonable to wonder how people who based their plans on rosy projections are faring. And journalists are out there interviewing people to find That Guy who retired with no safety net and now has to go back to work. Why? Confirmation bias: everyone is afraid to take a risk like that, because it seems so out of the mainstream; the crisis that everyone feared has now hit; ergo, people want to read about how That Guy now has to go back to work, because it confirms that they were right not to follow that path.
Of course, what they're missing given their surface-level understanding is that it isn't about saving the bare-minimum you need to scrape by assuming everything goes right. Every good FIRE plan has a bunch of built-in safety mechanisms, from budgeting a variety of luxuries that can be cut, to planned part-time or periodic work on passion projects, to having the skills to reduce expenses by DIYing pretty much everything you need, to planning for a lower SWR, to keeping a bond/CD ladder to ride out the storm, etc. etc. etc. But a story about someone who planned to FIRE, FIREd, was caught in a giant economic meltdown, and stayed FIREd and happy isn't exactly exciting enough to attract attention, and it doesn't reassure the masses that they've made the right decision.