> "but he's a genius and does such great work that we should tolerate the bad things he does". I really thought we'd started to move past that over the last few years.

Nobody thinks this of RMS. He's a competent developer who was in the right place at the right time to found a new ideology: The idea that software should work for the user, the only way for software to do so is to empower the user to also be a developer themselves. That's all.

Being competent himself wasn't a sufficient condition for anyone to listen to him, but it was necessary.