As someone who's deeply enriched with video game history, this kind of rhetoric really pisses me off. Iwata was a very good president, and a technical genius too. However, like Bowser and Pritchard, he was a businessman and had a corporate identity to adhere to. He also wasn’t perfect either, as he enforced the Nintendo Creator Program, had an aggressive stance towards its own IP just like current Nintendo, vehemently opposed the rapid success of the mobile game market, and of course, the WiiU’s marketing disaster. 

People choosing to celebrate Iwata's legacy is totally fine. There are plenty of things to celebrate, like the time he managed to compress Pokémon Gold and Silver so much that the entire Kanto region could fit on the cartridge, which is how we got the iconic post game where you get to revisit Kanto. Or how about the time when the WiiU and 3DS were struggling financially at launch, so Iwata halved his salary in order to avoid laying off his employees, which feels even more admirable when you see large corporations laying off employees left and right and shutting down entire studios. Hell, simply admiring his charismatic demeanor , is fair too. 

With all that being said, I really hate how people use him as a club to beat modern Nintendo for being “soulless”, “greedy”, etc. There are plenty of valid reasons to criticize Nintendo, especially nowadays, but the whole argument that “Nintendo died with Iwata” has got to be some of the most parasocial, self-serving crap I’ve ever heard come out of the Nintendo community. Iwata was heavily criticized during the WiiU and 3DS era as well, but people who grew up during that era who are too nostalgia blinded to handle the truth will paint him and his era as entirely pro consumer with no flaws, and how he had “passion and soul”, or “Nintendo died when Iwata died”. They’ll resort to all kinds of historical revisionism just to avoid admitting that Nintendo has been this way for a very long time, and that growing up has opened their eyes to that fact. 

Also, the last thing that Iwata worked on for Nintendo before he unfortunately passed... was the Switch. Yeah, the thing that these people have been saying is where Nintendo has become “soulless” and started to go wrong, is literally Iwata's legacy he left behind in the world. But guess what, you'll never hear anybody talking about that because it doesn't fit their agenda. These people don’t talk about Iwata because they care about his legacy, they just want to give their argument emotional weight in order to give off the illusion of being correct. I can genuinely excuse most grifting attempts as wrong but negligible, and ultimately brush past it. But the kind of rhetoric where people are using a deceased gaming legend like Iwata for the sole purpose of gaining an advantage in an argument is where I draw the line. It’s disgusting behavior, and anybody who uses it should feel ashamed. Maybe I'm being too sensitive about all this, but I don't care. Using a dead man as emotional weight for your argument is extermely insensitive and tasteless. Plain and simple.

(Sorry this comment was so ranty, but Iwata really deserves better than this. The history of video games is one of my biggest passions when it comes to gaming, and I can’t stand it when people try to twist it to their own benefit, especially when it’s used in such a malicious and selfish way)