The polls weren't garbage. They were closer this year than they were in 2012. They were just slightly wrong in the wrong direction.

It's not a pejorative. It's a common phrase meaning "the quality of your output is only as good as your input data".

In this case, input data was skewed/biased/inaccurate for a number of reasons (sample choices, underreporting, etc.). Thus even the best predictions were wrong.

That's true, but the trouble is that if you look back to past elections, those polls are also wrong in very similar ways. They were just wrong in a way that overemphasized the success of the right candidate, whereas polls this year were wrong in a way that suggested success for the wrong candidate. So the errors have existed for a long time, and in fact they were lesser this year than in previous years. Polls are getting better, not worse - but the narrative has become "never trust polls again because they were wrong" when the truth is closer to "learn lessons from the polls because they got close but made serious missteps."

That's only an issue if you don't account for uncertainty in your polling data. If you ever read their articles or listened to the model talk podcast you'd know that a huge amount of effort was put into trying to quantify the uncertainty in the polls based on historical polling errors and factors unique to this year.