I do not understand your argument. Criticizing RMS harshly has been a regular past-time for thousands of people in computing since forever, even by close collaborators. It's not that the man had a police force to protect him, but he used to take criticism with dignity. I cannot see how anybody could have ever been afraid of criticizing RMS (unless, say, they were one of the handful of FSF employees, which is not the case).

It is only when RMS has shown some "weakness" by resigning from his two alma maters due to journalistic pressure, that the rats jump in the criticism to finish the job.

Yes, there are many rats and attention whores jumping in and it is truly disgusting.

But FSF definitely also had and has some cult like mentality, with not much tolerance and not much restraint sometimes. So I can understand that people with low self esteem tried not to cause a shitstorm by speaking up.