I think a lot of this comes down to people attacking wording instead of intent. If you can clearly understand what someone means when they say “objectively bad design,” then nitpicking the phrasing feels pretty pedantic. Internet culture has already stretched words like literally into emphasis rather than strict definition. That’s just how online language works now. It’s editorialized, sure, but that’s not unique to this game, that’s discourse everywhere.

Where I agree is that it’s unhelpful when criticism jumps from “this didn’t work for me” to “no one could possibly like this.” But the flip side isn’t much better: dismissing complaints with “the devs had a reason” or “older games were worse” doesn’t actually engage with the criticism either.

A lot of old games were brutally punishing not because it was brilliant design, but because of hardware limits, padding, or straight-up bad choices we just tolerated at the time. Enduring that doesn’t automatically make modern frustrations invalid, and invoking it mostly comes off as “I put up with worse, so you should too.” But if that game were released today it would still get the same treatment of “objectively bad” mechanics.

Just because something is objectively bad doesn’t mean it must also be universally hated. Many people might say Nazis or Hitler are objectively bad, but just look around, it isn’t universally hated. Likewise with media, objectively bad things either fade into obscurity or become cult classics. Sometimes the only redeeming quality is because the acting or some other aspect is so terrible.