I was a daily reader of CAD at the time and I thought the reaction was disproportionate, but none of my partners have ever had a miscarriage during the time I was with them, as far as I know. (I cannot have a miscarriage myself.) There were some reactions that just seemed “mean”, but some people that had experienced a miscarriage (or a partner’s miscarriage) felt attacked/wronged by the comic for various reasons. I personally thought it was creative, tho it was not the tone I was expecting.
I think we mostly still don’t really know what makes things “go viral”, so I’m really not sure why it did, though I think most of the “meme-abilty” has to do with how “recognizable” the minimalist takes make it. Ex: :.|:;
Definitions are tricky, and especially for terms that are broadly considered virtuous/positive by the general public (cf. “organic”) but I tend to deny something is open source unless you can recreate any binaries/output AND it is presented in the “preferred form for modification” (i.e. the way the GPLv3 defines the “source form”).
A disassembled/decompiled binary might nominally be in some programming language–suitable input to a compiler for that langauge–but that doesn’t actually make it the source code for that binary because it is not in the form the entity most enabled to make a modified form of the binary (normally the original author) would prefer to make modifications.