Intuitively I disagree with the original tweets but I suspect there’s a specific context in which their professor said what they said and that context has been stripped out and the statement has been made to stand in general as how “critics” should approach “creators.”
Like without knowing anything else about this professor or what their class is like I would feel comfortable making the assumption that they are speaking in the context of peer review and criticism sessions in class. and if that’s the context, then yeah absolutely! You don’t want to be rude to your classmates and peers who are learning alongside you; you don’t want to be so mean in those environments that somebody never wants to write again. Totally agreed.
But the idea that outside of that context all criticism is supposed to operate in this mode of “helping someone create better,” uh, nah. If something is not only structurally poor but also malicious or awful in terms of its content, I’m not going to be thinking about rules of decorum or collegiality or whether or not the creator ever makes anything again.
Hbomberguy’s video on James Somerton is a great example of this. Brewis brought all of his critical faculties and research staff’s power to bear on criticizing Somerton’s extensive history of plagiarism, but also spent time correctly identifying the other essayist as deeply uncreative, lazy and uninteresting. These are not straight facts about Somerton; they are also specific points of critique, borne out in the evidence. Somerton deleted his whole internet presence within 24 hours, and honestly? I hope he never makes another essay again.
Anyway, criticism is multifaceted and complicated and not able to be boiled down to any single method of practice.