It's totally normal for corporations to go after business executives personally in civil cases, but it's also usually pretty easy for those targeted executives to have the claims against them dismissed. Typically it's just an intimidation tactic.
Those words are synonyms. What you seem to be objecting to is that it should not be normal or common. But it is. “Normal” doesn’t mean “acceptable” or “neutral”, it means “standard”, “usual”, “typical”, “expected”, “common”. Slavery was never ethical or good, but at a point in history it was normal.
Don’t avoid what is in front of you. Do fight for a better normal but recognise when something you disapprove of is the current normal.
You might want to think about this this other way.
If you were severely harmed by the actions of a specific person who happened to also be a business executive, should you be allowed to pursue that business executive in court?
Let’s say for example a wealthy man decides, for his personal amusement, to bulldoze your home. The bulldozer is owned by a LLC with no assets or insurance but the man is very rich. Should you be allowed to sue him personally?
How about if a family decides to engage in purposeful behavior in selling a deadly addictive drug that kills hundreds of thousands of people, making billions of dollars. Should they be allowed to walk away?
The “strange” convention that we adhere to is that we let people shield themselves from the consequences of their behavior behind corporate structures. Not the other way around.
The least we can do is ask them to show up in court and explain why that legal fiction should apply to them.
These days, sadly, ethical behavior has almost nothing to do with the civil courts. Even in the article at OP, you can see how cases become little more than battles of financial attrition, with tactics (like dumping millions of foreign-language documents) designed to force your opponent to spend huge sums of money in the hopes of forcing a settlement.
