I'm not sure they are. I certainly didn't read it as a puff piece. After enumerating all of Uber's problems, I think the "he had lived to fight another day" conclusion is supposed to be a little wry.
As far as I know it's not like the proofs caused a wave of suicides, but mathematicians studying this topic often became mentally unstable, including Godel (who starved himself in a sanatorium) and others like Georg Cantor.
I'm curious where you studied; I also took a semester course on "logic and computability" where the main text we read was 'Godel, Escher, Bach'
We briefly talked about Godel's proofs, but they are nontrivial. Henkin's proof of completeness is hard enough[1]. I don't mean to sound dismissive, but a class where Godel, Escher, Bach is the text does not seem very rigorous. Logic is very tricky stuff. And once you get into infinities, it's not even intuitive.
This article referenced some guys jumping off buildings... maybe it was more of the journalist's interpretation, connecting the sort of thing you mentioned with the suicides in a less direct way than I recall. I have wondered if it was a real news clipping (it looked like one), or some kind of old joke.
To answer your question, I went to one of the so-called "elite" American colleges that still has a primarily classical/analytic philosophy program (as opposed to what is known as a "Continental" program). Would rather not say which one, but I was able to take some great logic courses through the philo department.
We used Godel's work directly, and if memory serves also some Goldfarb.
