Yes. The commenter is upset because a mesh network that he helped build for another purpose also provides a convenient dense network of radios that can be used to track staff, and that this is now the primary use case.
"All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbors were)."
Most nodes in a radio based system will do rssi measurements to any other nodes that they need to communicate with directly, as part of deciding appropriate tx/rx amplification levels / when nodes are unavailable / etc. These functionalities are often easy to access to enable easier debugging, so it's a relatively straightforward change to start using them to scan other things on the same protocol etc.
"All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbors were)."