I don't put a lot of stock in either side of this. The players aren't going to tell a team reporter if they hate their coach's guts, but there's no evidence the Chiclets guys have anything but thirdhand hearsay if that. And it's ultimately a little bit of a sideshow, players can love bad coaches or hate good ones. It's not really make or break in itself (unless the coach is being genuinely abusive.)
But what in the bug-eyed name of Wild Wing does "He has shifted his approach to value players individually." actually mean? Does it mean he needed over a year on the job to realize the players weren't interchangeable cogs to be hammered into any old machine? It would explain the attempt to impose dump and chase on this roster, I guess. Does it mean he (not unlike Verbeek sometimes) was treating them like it's a video game where the human element simply doesn't matter? Team morale and confidence are actually very important.
I legitimately don't see any way to frame that sentence as a positive thing. Oh good, he's finally learned his players are individuals, I'm glad the player development coach eventually figured that out.
This seems like a theme.
—It took him two months to figure out you shouldn't have warmups then sit around being talked at for an hour before actually practicing. (This is comparatively small, yeah, but it's such a weird thing to have ever been doing in the first place.)
—He backed off for 20 games of "see what the players do when they're left to figure it out on their own" but somehow still showed up to camp with a system that was an obviously poor fit for his roster. He changed it ~15 games in, great, but that's still nearly half a season worth of games (and a training camp) of poorly utilized coaching and development.
—He's had to shift to valuing his players as individuals? Whatever exactly that means.
This guy is supposed to be doing the teaching. How many more extended learning arcs is he going to need, and what impact is it having on the players he's supposed to develop? IMO that's the most important question, not how much the players like him or how many games they've won.