Its also a big contributor as to why a lot of people think HR are useless. Once you respond in any way that could be considered unprofessional you just made it messy and increased the risk to the company of doing anything other than issuing slap on the wrist warnings.

Take the meme for example, now the company has to make a morality decision on whats worse, an unprompted and inappropriate but not deliberately hurtful comment from a manager vs a deliberate and highly personal barb from an employee to a manager... I can see the warning letters for both of them from here.