My first instinct was to say this seems like an overreaction to a joke, but this is a meme that originated from 4chan and the worst parts of reddit, so you might not be far off, given the track records for violence there.
Whenever I say it's a problem people are there to say I'm overreacting, but literally every time someone pops up out of the woodwork and confirms that they genuinely believe that some people are really NPCs, i.e. that they have no "soul" or self and are internally autonomous, like a computer.