I can’t say anything about the down votes but from what I saw, I the criticism was always there but it grew over time as the stuff Musk promised customers drifted years and years further away, and his increasingly unhinged social media antics made it harder and harder to give him the benefit of the doubt. It felt a lot like what happened with President Bush where some people who really wanted democracy in the Middle East or Afghanistan kept coming up with these 5-dimensional chess theories based on the assumption that he shared their goal and must have some deeper plan where it all made sense, only to eventually accept that it was just as disorganized as it appeared on the surface.