This is bullshit rhetorical sophistry, and I'm pretty sure you know it.
Choosing an incompatible license is the fault of the person who chose the license. The FSF made a mistake in not building "... or any later version" into the GPLv2; they acknowledge this. They've been recommending for some time - since long before the start of the Git project - that projects interested in being GPLv2 compatible include "... or any later version."
Imagine it was a piece of software with a bug. There's a patched version, it's been broadly announced that there was a bug and there is a fix. You ignore that and use the buggy version. Whose fault is it when you trip over the bug? Claiming it is "entirely of [the programmer]'s own making" is absurd.
"No, I don't know it. The GNU's license absolutism is what got them into this mess in the first place. It's inherent in their aims."
Dismantling of copyright and a replacement with a requirement ensuring the freedoms the FSF cares about would thrill them, and not produce this license-incompatibility mess. It is plain, therefore, that it is not at all inherent to their aims. It may be inherent to this particular strategy - but again, license compatibility is something they've been looking at explicitly since making the mistake with GPLv2.
"Imagine that it's a piece of software with a new UX direction not everyone agrees with."
If the criticism was "They did not use GPLv3", that might be a more reasonable analogy than mine. The criticism was they used GPLv2 when they could have used GPLv2+. It's like using the buggy version specifically because others can't use the new UX with it (even though I can still use my old UX with the fixed version). Characterizing that as a move in opposition to those that like the new UX is the only reasonable characterization, absent other overriding factors (back out of metaphor, the only possible reason I could see is a need to use a lot of GPLv2 code in Git - someone else would have to speak to whether that is reality).
Choosing an incompatible license is the fault of the person who chose the license. The FSF made a mistake in not building "... or any later version" into the GPLv2; they acknowledge this. They've been recommending for some time - since long before the start of the Git project - that projects interested in being GPLv2 compatible include "... or any later version."
Imagine it was a piece of software with a bug. There's a patched version, it's been broadly announced that there was a bug and there is a fix. You ignore that and use the buggy version. Whose fault is it when you trip over the bug? Claiming it is "entirely of [the programmer]'s own making" is absurd.