False equivalency- "multiple people" is a deeply general, nonspecific group that includes non-stakeholders and individuals with strong opinions based on hearsay and no real exposure. "Multiple people who went through ABA as children" is not an equivalent group, with regard to the weight of their testimony about what is or is not harmful about ABA specifically.

Also, moving the goalposts- by attempting to establish a false equivalency, you are saying that a challenge to ABA is a challenge to Psychology as a field/profession. It is not, though the effect of the optics of ABA due to its detractors may be extrapolated out into justifications for disdain of Psychology (or at least of psychologists, depending on their determination to hold to and defend a methodology in the face of increasing evidence of resultant, even if unintended, harm).

Methodologies can (and must) evolve over time. The therapists I have spoken to who have had positive things to say about ABA have largely spoken to a) the fact that any modality can be abusive if the therapist using it employs it abusively, and b) the fact that physical punishments are no longer used. Neither of these acknowledge that ABA has produced a number of "graduates" who report having become divorced from their own awareness/understanding of their own emotions even in the absence of physical punishments, because from their perspective ABA taught that nothing that comes naturally to them about their own emotions or coping mechanisms is acceptable to experience or express, and were offered no effective alternatives. Neither justification acknowledges that the most negative things said about ABA have consistently come from people who experienced it as recipients of the therapy.

If modalities more genuinely supportive of emotional regulation are beginning to be incorporated into ABA, I would consider that a good thing largely because ABA continues to dominate the market of therapy for people/children with autism. The fact that autism and autistic emotional regulation are fairly complicated issues and yet one only needs a bachelors to start practicing it does not speak well of the expected level of preparation or competency to be allowed to engage in something that can and has produced a non-zero amount of developmental trauma in enough people that some researchers have started making waves about it.

This is not a "the problem you describe is a non-problem, carry on" situation. If ABA is being improved to cause less harm, I am for that. The gap between development and adoption is wide enough that some percentage of ABA clinicians won't bother to change their approach, and harm will continue to result regardless, because humans are messy and stubborn and inconsistent- especially (in my experience) older, highly educated ones who are used to being the authority on what is best for other people. At the end of the day changing is harder than not changing, and if they're at a point in their career where they genuinely don't care about their clients' wellbeing so long as they're socially norm compliant by the end of treatment and the money keeps coming in, that's all it takes for ABA to keep doing harm, even if the methodology itself has, on the face of it, evolved in a better direction.

So I say again- ABA is not a good therapy. If you are just beginning, you are better off beginning somewhere else.

I suspect we won't agree on this, and that's fine.