Rather than fully explain one’s feelings on certain design choices or attempt to engage in those as artistic decisions, I feel like I just see “bad game design” thrown around as a thought terminating cliche
Ergo, there is no such thing as "bad design," and you should instead ask yourself what the designer of a game was trying to say with the mechanics and whether it comes across.
But that's haaaaaard
When this is aimed directly at (mostly studio-employed) developers by fans, I call it Temporarily Embarrassed Game Developer Syndrome because while it's obviously far easier to yell about how a game is bad and the developers should feel bad than it is to make a game, it's also very hard to fully understand that when you have a passionate interest but no actual experience. So there are lots of gamers out there who have penned or recorded thousands of words of commentary about "bad game design" that essentially boil down to, "You're squandering the opportunity to do my dream job. I should be there, not you."
This resentment leaves absolutely no room for nuanced criticism or even self-reflection about their experiences, because what they're actually saying is that the game's creators are incompetent, and they would have done a better job. While they're probably not consciously making this calculation, the more the "incompetent" devs are fired or ridiculed, the more room there is for fans--the people who really know how to make games--to replace them.
What I find especially interesting is that if these types make a strong enough case to other players, or their presentation is polished enough, they do get fan followings who adopt their ideas and consider them experts on game design; sometimes they'll even lobby studios to hire them or dogpile developers who piss them off.
And they're always talking out their asses. I've never seen one attempt to actually learn how game production works beyond inferring things from industry news, which usually leads them to treat the most boring-ass office day job minutiae as vaguely sinister omens. They don't want to think of it as a job. If you think of it as just a job, you don't belong there! They love games so much that they'd do anything to be there. They'd sleep on the floor, accept shittier pay, work all through the night--anything except learning or doing the boring shit all by themselves that might dispel the illusion of it being more than just a fucking job.
It's super hard and kind of thankless to do creative stuff on your own with no audience; it's way more fun and immediately rewarding to yell about what you'd totally do right if you had the resources of an entire studio, and sometimes you can make more money doing that, too.
