It is a bit tricky to parse this, and if you weren't there it maybe won't parse at all. It was not like that. A flood of people appeared instantly, even before the game was published, to deride the entire enterprise. Forums were filled with pure bunkum (substitute appropriate term here) written by people who had never played the game and clearly had not the faintest notion of what it was spewing nonsense.
Note that I don't, at all, aim that at
@Bedrockgames for example. I think his opinion differs from mine and that's cool, we just have different tastes. If all I ever saw was comments from guys like him it would have been simply a bit frustrating, but that's not even close to how it was. Heck, you can go back to 2008 and dig up the threads. Enworld is pretty strongly modded, and there's still a good bit of it here. If you went to the WotC forums of the day (sadly extinct) you would get the full force of it. It was like 9 posts out of 10 were just ignorant drivel. You literally could not even start a thread, it would just be instantly filled with trash drive by D&D4=WOW trash posts. Again, written by people who, at most, skimmed the PHB for 5 minutes.