My impression of this blog isn't it's constructive (though I suppose if you just do the opposite of what she's ripping on it could be) but it's definitely not calling out bad practices with broad strokes. It's calling out individual homes (with pictures) that actual people live in presumably because that's what they decided they liked.

I hadn't seen /r/programminghorror before either. I think if you could pretty easily tie the code samples back to the programmer who wrote it and it was that snarky, that yes it'd be mean spirited. And -- while I enjoy elegant code too -- I don't think I would care what other people choose to use or write in production, provided I didn't hire them, have to work with them, or it was bad enough to affect the product I was using.