I read the article and I think you paint just as an inaccurate picture. His colleagues went ahead without him. They friggin left him behind. They told him he was going the wrong way via messaging. It’s not like he insisted they were wrong as they are telling him to his face he was going the wrong way.
The article doesn’t say why they went ahead of him and no one stayed behind, so we can only speculate and hope that that level of carelessness was actually warranted.