You're describing a policy of not making frank assessment of the efficacy of business practices.

That’s a bit far. From my perspective, the point is that looking at inefficiencies in isolation is as bad as looking at benefits in isolation.

Making a frank assessment about the efficiency of meetings is probably of limited value in and of itself in abstractly assessing the overall equation of trade-offs in running a distributed vs collocated business. Even more so when concretely assessing this particular company.

There's an asymmetry between the strong negative reaction to criticism but not to praise, even though criticism is more likely to offer substantive points. This suggests to me that people are mostly offended at the arrogance of the commenter rather than working about the risk that we could all become mistaken through reading overconfident criticism.

Every bully I remember tried to mask their bullying as “helpful” or positive in some way.

Every dictator promised to make the nation better. This is not a good reason to reject politicians trying to make the nation better.

More like a policy of avoiding drive-by commentary on businesses with which one has little knowledge or investment.

> It will always be easy to look at something from the outside and point out all the ways it should or can’t work or could work better.

People pay me to do exactly that. Come in with a fresh, unbiased view on things, look at how stuff works and what could be improved.

It's not about telling people that everything they've done before is BS but if there are things that are not working well, just tell them.