There's a bunch of discourse on my tl about respect and curiosity towards game design and I agree generally speaking but also I think for me there's an element of optimism to statements like these in that probably 70% of the games I've ever worked on were, to quote the excellent Karla Zimonja, "drunk-walking towards completion" and sometimes you really do end up with a design cobbled together from a bunch of goals you're not sure how to execute, a bunch of decisions that might have been good ideas separately or at the time and now you're stuck with them. Treating that as always intentional and artistic is well meaning but well and truly, sometimes game development is in fact a polite disaster that somehow turns out okay (or doesn't)
are two concepts in play here, i think.
when you bring critical insight without good faith, it can easily become merciless. every limitation the creators were up against was their fault for not fixing. there's a paradox of objectivity here where being unable or unwilling to situate yourself in the creators' perspective probably means you will actually miss a lot of what was shaping their decisions. some of the "objective game reviews" demonology arises from this.
when you bring only good faith, you are inclined to take every decision in a game as 100% intentional, past a point of naivete - insisting a game's obviously clunky control scheme or lumpy storytelling is "on purpose" because its director's auteur cred casts a long shadow over the work itself, for example. this leads to conventional wisdoms that are unable to examine creative choices in the full context of their goals and constraints, where much of the "good game design / bad game design" dogma & discourse come from - which fwiw i do believe some designers feel overly beholden to, getting sucked into the "customer is always right" feedback loop that makes the medium stagnant and unchallenging in the broadest sense.
it can be easy to fall into either of these, but i think even novice creators learn on some level that each reflects incomplete understandings of what it's like to create something. the idea of everyone who's interested in games being able to try their hand at making one, at least once, is a nice thought.
and i think the reason that "darksidephil" (had to look up the bozo's name) video, where he demands everything be immediately legible, is so exhausting to watch is that he's bringing neither; he is totally affronted to be wondering about anything, totally incurious about why something on screen is the way it is, and also ready to assume the worst.
