I don't know that Gygax was specifically doing that with the appendix, but he definitely had opinions about how the game was meant to be run throughout the book in general, and it did help turn the appendix into a sledgehammer for gatekeepers to use. Gygax is the authority, if you don't run the game the way he tells you to run, if your games don't look like the stories listed in appendix N, etc. etc. you're doing it wrong.
I think this is an pretty silly complaint.
This is like complaining that someone hit you with the meat tenderizer you keep in the draw for the chicken, and blaming either the person who bought the meat tenderizer, or the person who designed it, rather than the absolute lunatic who hit you with it!
It's not normal or reasonable to expect, especially not in 1979, a list of inspirations, which was
explicitly non-exhaustive and which
undeniably and explicitly stated you
could and should be inspired by your own things, to be used as a
weapon. It would have been very strange to think that. So blaming Appendix N is clearly not logical nor reasonable.
As for Gygax's authority, you're re-writing history - he's been viewed very differently at different times, and hasn't been regarded as an actual authority since, like, literally the 1990s. How do I know that? Because I remember the discussions - by the time the internet even existed, the whole "Gygax is an authority" thing was completely in shambles. Most D&D players kind of sneered at him - it wasn't until 3E, weirdly, that there was some odd rehabilitation of him and his "opinions".
And Gygax's opinions on the game were multifarious and ever-changing! He wrote entire books about his opinions. For example:
Role-Playing Mastery (1987), and then, by the early 2000s at the latest had completely disavowed that very same book and said he was talking nonsense when he wrote it!
Further, the people who try and use Gygax or Appendix N as a "sledgehammer" have always been a joke. And I do mean always. Let's not trying and re-write history and pretend there was ever a period in RPG history where such people were taken seriously. Well not after about 1993 at least, I can't speak to before that. And 1993 was, I'm sorry, 31 years ago. So what's even really the complaint? That some numpty 20+ years ago got mad because your game wasn't sufficiently like Three Hearts and Three Lions?
Which absolutely happened and still happens, though not to nearly same extent (what once was gatekeeping has been reduced to old men yelling at clouds).
It was already "old men yelling at clouds" in 1993! No-one took that trash seriously! Literally when 15-year-old me got on the World Wide Web in 1993, and started looking for D&D stuff, one of the first things I found was a discussion how dumb Gary Gygax was and how bad his ideas were. Something that I completely agreed with! Why? Because I'd read
Role-Playing Mastery, in like 1991, and even aged 13, I was capable of realizing "Holy crap, the guy who wrote this is a terrible DM and should never be let near an RPG!", and I was well aware that man was Gary Gygax. I participated in countless forums, wrote and read unholy amounts of posts, and in none of those was Gygax seen as an authority or someone to be emulated. Indeed, he was regarded with a lot less positivity than Dave Arneson.
The worst I can say is that, for a brief period sometime after 3E came out - and by a brief period I genuinely mean like, at most 5-ish years, there was some weird revisionism where people suddenly started pretending Gygax (who was, admittedly, a more beneficent figure by then, and then of course he died) was totally righteous, but then people started finding stuff like the posts where he said genocide was totally cool and based and Lawful Good, and that kind of wore off again. But that was just him regarded more positively, not his ideas/suggestions.
So even then, anyone trying to say "You need to run your game like Gygax ran his!" or "You need to be inspired solely by Appendix N!" was not taken seriously. People arguing that were laughed at, just like they were in the 1990s.
Now maybe if you were in some sort of OSR compound, locked up and surrounded by grim-faced men with bastard swords and chainmail, maybe then you saw that "Gygax was right!" sentiment taken seriously - but it never was here, nor RPG.net, nor Shadowland.org, nor that any of the other sites I used to visit, nor was it taken seriously in person (not by people my age anyway).
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