If you've honestly never seen the types of leaders envisioned in this article you are very lucky indeed.
For a large majority of supervisors, if you give them carefully-worded, polite, respectful, private, accurate, truthful, ego-preserving feedback about something they're doing wrong, their response will range between "immediate firing" and "hold a grudge against you, fire you as soon as they can find a replacement". There is nothing that makes people as angry as accurately pointing out their flaws.
The way around this is in essence to get the leader to think it was their idea to make a change, which is possible in some cases but not in others.
It’s surprising to me that such dysfunctional orgs exist where a single person can just fire someone immediately over some feedback. How have they even grown to be a business with that attitude?
But sure, you do need to adapt your strategy for the environment you exist in. That’s just common sense.
The org has to be small for the firing to be immediate, but I have seen a "top of stack rank to unpassable PIP" be caused by a single conversation... and that's even in companies most of this forum would consider top performing. I would argue that trying to figure out the fragility of your management chain's ego is a key part of a successful career, even if what we are going to do with the news is to choose to change jobs.