We can't make proclamations like "we can't make proclamations that say 'this is bad!'" either.
Of course there are people who prefer any conceivable style you might bring up. That doesn't mean there can't be legitimate strengths and weaknesses between them, up to the point where "this is bad" is an accurate shorthand for "on most metrics of interest, this design is worse than its competitors."
People get up in arms about plenty of stuff that doesn't matter. Sometimes it's a matter of taste and the preferences are spread widely. Sometimes it's down to familiarity; "OMG CHANGE!" is a real thing. Sometimes it's a pet peeve that hardly anyone cares about. But that doesn't mean there can't be legitimate bases for comparison and opinions.
UX people complain, often rightly, that they receive excessive and unfounded abuse for decisions that are a matter of debatable preference. Abuse is bad. Opinions can be excessive or ill-conceived or reactive or abusive or whatever. But the pendulum has swung so far now that any complaints about UX are automatically dismissed as irrelevant and problematic. It doesn't matter whether you have a well-founded argument for your opinion; your opinion is unwanted and every word of your argument, every point you make, is seen as only proving that you're a jerk and a crank. "Trust the UX people." "It's not fair to complain about something when you're not the expert and they are." Yeah, whatever. I'm a user, and if I'm having trouble using, that should matter to someone who has some say.
For example, adding data labels to a scatterplot. Completely insane how they want you to do it.
Or removing the Y axis from a bar chart. Have to make the text size 11 and white. Why?
There's a lot of little things like this that are just mind-numbing.
I like native PowerPoint charts (not Excel) and R's ggplot2 personally.