I think my biggest stumbling block for discussions like these is there is seemingly no depth a person will go to in search of something to dislike.
Designing games takes a lot of time, and increasingly, costs a lot of money. Players who hate this about games will criticize it loudly and furiously, wielding it like a cudgel on anyone who doesn't criticize whatever game has their ire. They will also, almost without fail, buy this games on or around launch, and the companies that make these games will see these numbers and continue to do what they want, insulated from the community's ire while critics who reviewed it well (or even just too okay for someone's taste) and the social media managers get the brunt of it.
Criticizing games is a road that could take any number of forks. Kotaku has covered genitalia mods in games, discussing the relative difficulty of dealing with certain bits over others, and how that has made a prevalence of nude mods for (N)PCs of one physical sex, but a near total absence of mods for the other. However, this kind of thing is weird to cover, but of interest to someone out there. Probably multiple someones. Likewise, some critics spend a ton of money doing deep, in-depth research, interviews, scouting, to produce excellent and incredibly journalistic reports about something some readers don't care about, so they ignore it while complaining that "game journalists never do anything." Austin Walker's excellent coverage on the Sleeping Dogs game that will never be. Wesley Yin-Poole's Lionhead Studios retrospective. Cecilia D'Anastasio's Sexism at Riot Games piece. Some critics spend a great deal of effort writing 1,600 words of a review on a popular title, and spare 200 other words in the same review to discuss something of social or political importance to them (and probably a section of their readership as well), and despite the 1,600 words of review that covers exactly what some vocal complaints call for, they only focus on the 200 they disliked even though that same article gave them exactly what they want. There is no single road to a good review, criticism, or opinion, but there is a pretty singular guarantee that someone, someone, will hate something in any piece of criticism, for any reason.
Plop a professional speedrunner of Doom in front of Smash Bros. Ultimate and they might struggle to defeat some of the higher level enemies. Put a master of flight sims in a driving pit for iRacing and they will very probably crash more than once around a track. Plop me in front of a Street Fighter II cabinet and I'll lose every round, plop me in front of a Soul Calibur III arcade and I'll probably win more battles than I lose. Plop anyone on the road to gaming, and that road could take many forks. I am better than you, no matter who is reading this, at some games. Of this I have almost no doubts. I am worse than you, no matter who is reading this, at some games. Of this I have almost no doubts. So, "good at games" is a weird metric to get stuck on, particularly because the examples people often site — a handful of the same writers — across the entirety of games criticism, is such a comically small number that it makes almost zero difference in the grand scale. But I will hear these same names over, and over, and over, and over again.
The internet loves to focus on what makes it angry. Anger is far more viral than mirth. So it doesn't matter what the subject, or how it's executed, people will find and circulate reasons to be angry at it.
In this kind of environment, why should anyone spend their energy worrying about what the disproportionately angry people are yelling about, when that same energy could be so much better used doing good? Especially because the largest missteps are seemingly "has a bad opinion about <x>" or "doesn't love games enough by an arbitrary gatekeeping metric that changes depending on who and when you ask."
