I find it hilarious that you reference the Patrick H Willems video, but at the same time say that media critics are using 'sleight of hand' rhetoric, with plot holes/logic criticism, while he is pretty much doing the same with theme and characters criticism. He is not actively interacting with the arguments and points made by these media critics, but pretty much waving this criticism aside, because the aspects they criticize don't matter according to him, unlike the aspects he thinks are most important, like characters arcs, themes and what it made him feel. He is using neat editing and talking like he knows it all, but his arguments are poor or non-existent. Saying that People are illogical, so that why characters can act stupid is justified is such a shoddy argument, because when character is acting illogical only to further the plot, and not acting illogical based on the knowledge we have of that character or the situation they are in, that undermines the character and the plot. Especially since this seems to happen more often because of lazy plot based writing, where a scene must happen, so we must write to the scene instead of writing characters that act believable based upon their character. A parent choosing the life of its child over that of ten strangers is maybe a illogical choice in terms of objective math, but logical in sense of character and interpersonal relations. the plot hole criticism has always been present, but the reason we talk more about them, seems more a result of a decline of quality of writing in popular movies than a wish of the audience to speak about it.
His defense of holdo withholding information, because of course we are talking about the Last Jedi here, for the sake conflict and drama is a prime example of this lazy writing. She must be written as illogical so that the film can drum up conflict for Poe and a reason for Finn to go to the casino planet. Her decision of withholding doesn't seem to be based upon her character or her own logic. She pretty much does nothing as the commander, resulting in Poe and the rest of the crew thinking that they are going to die by her inaction. So as a viewer I am asking myself why would she do that? does she have ulterior motives? Maybe she wants to hide the facts that she is going to sacrifice herself so that nobody is going to stop her? These would be 'logical' reasons for her to act the way she does, but no, she just written this way to facilitate conflict so the movies could have a story. A lot of the resulting story lines are pretty jarring, meaningless and extremely hamfisted in their presentation themes: "slavery is bad okay, fuck the 1% am I right guys? save the animals." The presence of themes should not be considered a plus by default, the form how these themes are presented should be considered and in TLJ this is hilariously bad. When seeing these scenes and asking yourself in frustration why are we watching this/why is this happening, just to realize it is because of Holdo being written as a idiot just so we can get these poor C-stories, I find it really hard to care or get infested, because the writer didn't seem to care either.
Sure, Poe was a demoted and a idiot at the start of the movie, so Holdo has a reason to find him unreliable, but he is voicing the concern of the crew when he is asking what her plan is. So her not saying anything to anyone just seems as a poor way of creating conflict that seems to be just there for plot reasons instead of actions resulting of her character. This is underlined when Poe is unconscious and Holdo and Leila are talking about him and Holdo says he likes him. like what, first you don't trust him, then he pretty much tries to steal the ship of you, but he is a still a great guy. Patrick defends this by saying that humans are illogical, so characters can act like that, but this behavior has no base in reality or common sense. It just happens because otherwise there would be not reason to tell the story for some characters. And if the only way of telling stories of characters is by having characters acting illogical, then that is bad writing.
But according to Patrick I am watching movies wrong then and not focusing on the things that 'actually' matter like the presence of themes and characters with arc's. While in reality I think all these things matter in the context of one movie/book/video game/etc, because they empower and enhance each other. Having one of these aspect be bad in such a way that it is hard to ignore, makes a movie unstable and affects the presentation of the other aspects. in the case of TLJ, the poor plot and writing made me feel that this is poorly written film, which just made me question why it was written this way instead of hooking me and taking me on a space adventure.