She, as a professional webcomic artist, should know better what to do than her fans. Only she, and she alone, must be prepared and know how to deal with things like these. Fans usually encourage you on the wrong way. With good intentions, but in the wrong way.

Same happens for Youtubers. If they were to heed fan advice on how to deal with hate comments, the right thing to do would supposedly be to reply to each and every one of them with "haters gonna hate", "if you don't like don't watch" and ignore every legitimate criticism as just a "hate" comment… which we know does not work.

I mean, it's not a perfect summary.

It would seem as if she was surrounded by people who encouraged her to block and report and was already in the environment of a mindset that would encourage her to publically announce her intentions for the sake of everyone else. Anybody that spoke the sense of "ignore it" had their advice choked out by the indignation of people who've obviously never dealt with trolls, much less the beast that is /pol/.