As the article says, it's not for authorship (rel="author" and a bunch of other options), but for connecting profiles. What's borderline narcissistic about that? Is keybase.io also "borderline narcissistic" since you can verify accounts on it, or Github because you can link to your homepage from your profile? (which they actually mark up with rel="me", but that's all rel=me does: make the existing links machine readable, and the bidirectional linking allows some level of verification)
Thanks for clarifying and pardon my half-assed reading, I get the idea now!
I see the benefit of authenticating personal profiles and protecting people against account hijacking and fake accounts.
With "borderline narcissistic" I was referring to the fact that personal profiles are a giant part of the web nowadays (which is sad on some level) and creating even a special rel value for it felt like submitting to the current state of affairs.
Personal profiles were always a big part of the web; in the 90s, it was all those sites with URLs with a tilde (e.g. https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/), and lots of pages on Geocities et all were also personal profiles.
