Wow that's rude. No need to insult someone's upbringing on a thread based on their musings about a snippet of code.
Also you're wrong. Critique is useful in and of itself, not just as a direct means to getting something fixed. If person A doesn't have the time/skill to fix something, they can critique it, hope that person B sees the critique and goes on to fix it. Also, by critiquing it, it starts a discussion about what caused the problem, and how it might be fixed, which is useful for third parties reading the critique: now they know what not to do in their own code.
If you're censoring all of your criticisms just because you don't have the resources to execute on your own, you're hindering discussion and doing a disservice to the community. In a way you're bikeshedding.
Imagine if you were at a coffeeshop and the barista makes a racist remark about the customer in front of you. Do you sit there quietly and let it happen just because you don't have the power to fire him? Or maybe a less loaded example: suppose your friend gets scammed into paying $2000 for a $900 laptop, do you tell him? Doing so might make him feel stupid, but if you care for his well being you'll tell him so that he doesn't do the same thing again.
Criticism isn't rude, it's useful. Insulting someone based on two sentences they post on the internet isn't useful, it's rude.
The 'ol "raising awareness" argument is way too slippery to be nailed down and often leads people to finding exactly the interpretation w/r/t utility that they want.
Regardless, I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that telling a community of developers "old code is a bit shit" isn't useful. Especially when the code in question is on a codebase that already has a serious modernization effort underway. And there are already numerous better presented articles online introducing the ways open source could use someone's contribution and calls the reader to action.
Sitting around and "providing criticism" ad nauseam is also a hindrance, disservice, and bikeshed.
The author of the blog post[1] associated with that code sample has, in fact, attempted to submit patches to the original vim codebase. Many people have. They were rejected. That's why neovim exists now.
So this is providing criticism in the service of providing a solution.
