All of those things can also be totally valid parts of a well-told story. Not only that, any historically significant factual account of human beings is likely to contain at least one and probably more of those things.

Yes, only using those things, or using them to prop up otherwise poor writing, is most certainly a crutch. But generalizing that too far takes very significant parts of our nature and behavior -- for better or worse -- and casts them in an artificially negative light as invalid literary mechanics.