Andy Wingo was and still is right, and more people should say it publicly. What he wrote then had been widely believed among many free software developers - including many who had worked closely with the FSF and with GNU - for years, but the public worship of RMS was too strong for any of the people doing the actual work to say anything without getting seen as traitors to the movement by people like you. He and the other GNU maintainers who wrote that statement called out an accurate problem, and the free software movement would have been stronger had RMS and the FSF listened.
Every single thing that RMS refused to compromise on has been a weakness for the cause of software freedom. RMS didn't compromise on his technical vision for GNU's kernel, and the HURD barely works today. RMS didn't compromise on allowing GCC to have an IR, and LLVM, a weak-copyleft compiler, has caught up. RMS didn't compromise on his personal unwillingness to use non-free JS on the web and basically decided to ignore the web entirely as a result, and it was basically an abandonment of setting any strategic direction for the free software movement re the web. We have a whole generation of folks who are ready to insist that "open source" means anything on GitHub, license or no license.
We could have had a victorious free software movement. What we got was a cult of personality.
Every single thing that RMS refused to compromise on has been a weakness for the cause of software freedom. RMS didn't compromise on his technical vision for GNU's kernel, and the HURD barely works today. RMS didn't compromise on allowing GCC to have an IR, and LLVM, a weak-copyleft compiler, has caught up. RMS didn't compromise on his personal unwillingness to use non-free JS on the web and basically decided to ignore the web entirely as a result, and it was basically an abandonment of setting any strategic direction for the free software movement re the web. We have a whole generation of folks who are ready to insist that "open source" means anything on GitHub, license or no license.
We could have had a victorious free software movement. What we got was a cult of personality.