This is addressed in the article: "What we need to do is dial it down from 11 on the friendly meter…11 is just too creepy. There is a happy middle ground where developers can apologize and software can provide the user polite guidance about what to do next."

(The bomb icon on the original Mac was meant to be a joke (computers don't explode, obviously), but there's an apocryphal story that someone ran in a panic when they first saw it.)