Read that again:
Of course I won’t blink if you say that’s hyperbole, but you cannot possibly claim that it’s not self-righteous, and you are very confused if you think that it was posted in response to a defense of the sort of abuse which spawned this OP, because there just simply isn’t one.
Your posture depends on the assumption that omnivores are necessarily tolerant of horrific abuses of animals, that the current industry should or can be replaced with something radically different, and that boycotting supermarket chicken is the only ethical step to take if you don’t accept horrific abuse.
Pointing out that the scale of the need and simple economics dictate that it is not possible for the entire consumer supply to be filled with animals raised in pastoral conditions, lovingly groomed, given a surplus of space, and given affectionate touches from the time they are born until they are ready for slaughter. It is an industry and industry demands efficiency. We will always have factory farming, unless our numbers are thinned to a trace by some timely plague. This is (or at least should be, if you look around a little bit) an overwhelmingly uncontroversial position.
In no way does this apologize for or accept excessive inhumanity. To say, “There is a practical requirement for battery hens” does not mean that the speaker is peachy about hens being crammed into such small confines that they grow into chicken wire and get ripped apart when their removed from the cage, or kept in pens that allow waste from animals penned in tiers above them to rain directly down on them, or suffer an unacceptably high rate of disease or injury. It’s just a practical observation.
People who are blase about intolerable abuse are rare creatures, and it’s just silly to pretend otherwise. As with any industry, there are standards, oversight to enforce standards, and unethical people who ignore standards. A rational person’s emphasis is going to be on questions like “Are our standards high enough?” “Is there enough oversight?” and “What can I, as a consumer, do to mitigate the general situation?” When there are abuses, it does not make sense to just pretend that the need isn’t there, to project the abuses onto the entire industry, or to advocate for the most extreme reaction possible.
When you learn that some sneakers are made in sweatshops by children in unsafe conditions, you don’t immediately start advocating a barefoot lifestyle to remedy that situation. Rogue undertakers leaving unrefrigerated bodies stacked up for weeks and being sloppy about who gets buried where? Unless you opt for a viking burial, you must be okay with that, right? Public pool mismanaged to the point that people blithely swim in one with a corpse on the bottom for a couple days? Shut 'em all down and go to the lake!
When someone says something like “I have a family to feed, and the convenience and economy of supermarket meat is important to me, but to improve things I try to buy whole chickens rather than breasts and eat less meat than has become common - for example serving pork in the context of a stir fry where it is a small component, rather than putting a big thick chop on everyone’s plate with mashed potatoes and some token green beans,” then that person has taken practical and productive position and when you respond with something like “I wish you’d get eaten by something bigger so you might learn to properly empathize with your dinner,” you aren’t being terribly persuasive, because it becomes very clear that you are arguing from a position so at odds with practical reality you can be dismissed without a second thought.
