I think one of the main things is that game journalism is just in a shitty state right now, and this is mostly just a reaction to that.
Sites like Kotaku are fine for what they are, they gather bloggers and other interested writers to write about something they are passionate about. Unfortunately, practically every big gaming "journalism" site acts like Kotaku, and makes opinion pieces as opposed to actually being journalists.
Kotaku is a blog site which is fine within itself, unfortunately, practically every gaming site is a blog site and not something that's has "journalistic integrity." These people may write well and be entertaining, but are they aware enough to not have bias in their pieces, are they actually Journalist Majors from college looking to write about video games. The issue is is that there's nothing that seems to caters to an onset of adult readers who want to read about games as if it were a newspaper article and not an opinion piece.
That's why you see a lot of backlash to people complaining about reviews saying that "DRAGONS CROWN IS SEXIST, LET'S GIVE IT A 6.5" or we see shit like this with the Patreon. I don't think that said things are bad, but unfortunately, gaming journalism hasnt given us enough reason to doubt that they wouldnt be unbiased with regards to these things, so that's why these issues become so big. it's not that it's super bad, but it's just another large item that gets added to the katamari ball of games journalism.
All this stuff should be taken more as "we are not happy with games journalism, be less biased and have more journalistic integrity" then "this patreon issue is bad and we are only angry about this"