There definitely was violence on both sides, even the official counts put the casulties around 200 last I checked. Which were sadly probably preventable had the PLA been equipped with nonlethal control measures rather than...nothing.

I do credit your link as it surprisingly shows the violence both ways, a lot of modern sources like to paint it as being very one-sided. One thing I did notice even in the Esquire article you linked, they explicitly never mention Tiananmen in any of the pictures showing violence. Because, like in the account I linked, there was no violence in Tiananmen Square. Now if you said "Hey, there were outbreaks of violence around Beijing on June 4th" yes, that would be true. Even the CPC official accounts don't deny that.