This I'm going to agree with. One of the particularly odd things about the whole "social justice" craze is the desire to run everything through the legal system. It seems to be rooted in the idea that in any conflict, there must always be an authority figure to pronounce one side right and the other wrong, and there must be a visible, tangible punishment for the side deemed to be wrong, so they can be "taught a lesson" about how wrong they are. Maybe it's a lost art or not emotionally satisfying enough to just say that this person or group are being jerks and I don't want to deal with them anymore, including by trying to definitively prove to some authority figure why they are jerks.

Along those lines in this situation, I'm not really part of the Node/JS community, but I have at least heard of Crockford, and have never heard of Nodevember. It seems likely that the Nodevember people will suffer a lot more from this drama than Mr. Crockford. It seems petty and undignified to me for Crockford to start any kind of legal action, as they will probably suffer more from the lack of his presence and the drama related to this than any legal action would be likely to cause.