I'm pretty sure that if the author had put "black" instead of "white," this article wouldn't have even been linked here. It's fashionable to openly express anti-white bigotry these days.
Well yes because doing that substitution changes the meaning -- you're saying something fundamentally different in the latter article. It's no longer a piece about how a particular aspect of tech culture which got a foothold among the majority (white men) where that behavior not only doesn't reflect poorly on them, where a black man might get called aggressive and woman might get called bitchy, but is actively rewarded because that confidence is, sometimes mistakenly, used as a proxy for competence. And taken from a systems perspective this aspect of culture accidentally and through no ones fault created a prisoner's dilemma that forces group decision making to a local maximum instead of a global one. To write the same article about black people it would require a very different history and cultural context.
Is the meaning changed so much as to make it acceptable?
I take your point about "that substitution changes the meaning", but I strongly disagree that it changes it enough to make the substitution unacceptable and the original acceptable.