The air of superiority just rubs me the wrong way. So many of them make the assumption that someone who is simply offering a constructive criticism (not bashing or being ugly) must be a new fan or a bandwagoner. Ignoring that they could just be a realist. Also, they seem to forget in their gatekeeping that a lot of the "new" money is helping to finance the spend to the cap philosophy.
My issue is that I see very few people doing this. I see most people going from extreme to extreme on a monthly basis based on absurd expectations and a refusal to take into account the speed bumps that a top team will go through over the course of a season, let alone over a potential 10-15 year window. I think the team is petering out over the course of the stretch here and is going to have a tough time in the playoffs. So for the most part I’m more in alignment with the people you’re talking about than they’d think. But they’re such obnoxious and emotionally extreme doom and gloomers that there’s no real “agreement” with them. In November we were missing the playoffs. When that didn’t happen, we were a paper tiger. Today we’re sitting at 2nd in the league with 2 games left in the season, fading down the stretch and licking our wounds from a couple of highly critical and unexpected injuries (among other, valid things like goaltending, Corsi not translating to goals, etc), and the folks who’ve been saying we’re terrible and going to miss the playoffs all year are using it as an opportunity for a completely non sequitur of an “I told you so”. And that’s very annoying. I don’t think getting annoyed at those people is the same thing as gatekeeping fandom.