Then we stared seeing the first indications that real "negative" SEO was possible in certain circumstances and we complained even further. Stop counting links you don't like. Now we are at a point where we see old websites being told to remove or disavow links that may be as many as 10 years old.
Can Matt or Google really stand there and say that it took them 10 YEARS to figure out that not only was that a link that they didn't like, but it was so evil that now it needed to be removed from the internet? The solution has been, and always will be, stop letting things you don't like count as a plus in your algorithm. When in doubt, don't count it.
Instead, we have Google adding thousands of webmasters and site owners as a living part of the algorithm and getting them to remove all those links, plus many they can't see or understand the value of, by the use of fear and scare tactics. Remove these links are we will ruin your website rankings. It doesn't matter if you created or asked for them or not, remove them.
People have not only been complaining about this since Penguin came out (around two years now), before that they were complaining about the opposite: that Google's arbitrary rules were creating spammy links all over the internet. It's completely ignoring the past to pretend this is some new thing to fit a preconceived narrative.
Most of the SEO folks that seem to come out of the woodwork for these threads would agree with me that "This is pretty typical of 2014 Google" ignores years of them complaining about the exact same thing, except they're just happy to have more people on their side.