Mostly pretty feeble and wide of the mark, AFAICT. Taking the examples from your link in order:
Food service company employees were fired for allegedly not following company policy about celebrating Black History Month, after many diners protested. The problem wasn’t “cancel culture”, it was “corporate culture”: as in, the company had a stupid policy that a lot of its customers predictably objected to, and responded to the objections by scapegoating two singled-out employees.
Yoga studio management, apparently after years of ignoring complaints and requests from non-white and LGBTQ staff about their policy, goes broke from a combination of COVID lockdown and customer criticisms, despite introducing some “too little, too late” performatively “woke” changes.
White hospital employee posts anti-BLM Facebook video defensively fuming “See, I’m a white woman and I’m proud to be a white woman, and I’m not going to ask for forgiveness for something that my ancestors did, that I didn’t […] You can kiss my ass.” Complaints to her employer lead to her firing, despite her damage control efforts in a subsequent video claiming that “I’m angry because everybody is forcing us to support Black Lives Matter”.
(See my remark in a previous post about people figuring out how to behave themselves in public. Telling protestors against ongoing anti-Black racism and discrimination that they can “kiss [your] ass” because you’re not a slaveowner is not behaving yourself in public.
Should that sort of rude and ignorant public behavior be illegal? No, absolutely not, and nobody in this situation is trying to make it so. Should its reputational repercussions for your employer be overlooked or waved away on the grounds that it’s just your “personal beliefs” (that you voluntarily presented for the world to see in your attempt to call attention to what you think)? Nope, not really.)
A company gets boycotts and threats because of viciously racist and antisemitic social media posts made eight years previously by the owner’s teenage daughter, who subsequently cleaned up her act and took a leading role in the company business. This is IMHO the least bullshit of the listed attempts to portray damaging excessiveness of “cancel culture”, because I think children are entitled to more of a pass for past shitty behavior, because children. At the same time, though, it’s hard to argue with the anger of people upset about being expected to respect or deal with a prominent local business leader who in her adolescence, in a public forum, literally called for Jews and Blacks to be gassed, used extreme racial slurs, etc. Not to mention being expected to respect and deal with the company CEO who enabled her subsequent career success, although his leniency is understandable given his feelings as a father.
A private school teacher was fired for his weird “apology” to a student who had complained about the teacher’s mentioning in class that he thought abortion was wrong. For some reason, his apology to the student in front of the class and his supervisors contained the information that he “liked her” and considered her “a bright and engaging student”, which (not unreasonably, ISTM) was deemed inappropriately personal for the context. Given that the linked news article is from the strongly anti-abortion religiously conservative Christian Institute, and even they don’t manage to make the administrators’ decision look 100% irrationally tyrannical, I’m not at all convinced that there’s been any grave injustice done here.
The remainder of the listed examples are similar, with the occasional honest misunderstanding (e.g., a complaint that a truck driver was making a “white power” hand gesture, which he probably wasn’t, as the complainer later agreed).
Again, this whole issue is primarily about social media reach and ubiquity, not about intolerance per se. AFAICT, the vast majority of the responses in every case were simply individuals expressing their disagreement with and disapproval of the “canceled” person’s publicly expressed views. The difference nowadays is merely that enough of those individuals have access to public forums that employers are worried about reputational consequences for themselves.
That doesn’t make the individual expressions of disagreement and disapproval wrong or unethical, though. Like I said, the real problem here is not “cancel culture” but corporate culture. Companies are not giving employees adequate guidance on their behavior expectations, or doing due diligence about their own policies, and then expecting just to duck any conflicts by ditching employees who become “controversial”.