People have a right to attempt to quantify their personal preferences.
But they also have a duty (of intellectul accuracy/honesty) to do so as accurately as they can, and to respond in good faith to the analysis and criticism that such quantifying provokes.
To put it another way: there is a difference between "I don't like that" and "I don't like that because of [design/structural considerations ABC]". The dislike is not in dispute. The analysis, though, is fair game for discussion.
For a certain type of gamer, "Dissociated Mechanics" is about as good a terminology as any for a game mechanic that breaks their sense of immersion.
I don't agree. There is no coherent way of framing the mechanics that The Alexandrian frames as "dissociative" that does not capture the traditional D&D mechanics of AC and hit points, plus Gygaxian (but not 3E/5e) saving throws, plus 3E-and-onwards turn-by-turn, "stop motion" initiative and action economy.
That is to say: the mechanics per se don't explain what happens when a war devil uses the "Besiege Foe" power - the GM has to add some narration. All the mechanics tell us is that, whatever that narration, it has to be consistent in some fashion with the foe being vulnerable to the war devil's allies' attacks while him-/herself being unable to easily turn from the war devil to face those other attackers.
The mechanics per se don't explain what happens when someone is hit for 8 hp and (therefore) drops from (say) 42 to 34 hp. Someone at the table (most often the GM, I think) has to add some narration, and all the mechanics tell us is that, whatever that narration, it has to be consistent in some fashion with the character who lost hit points being closer to defeat as a result of his/her foe successfully pressing an attack.
It may well be that someone's immersion is harmed by the War Devil but not by the hit points. But whatever the explanation for that, it can't be that one brings its narration with it as able to be read straightforwardly of the mechanics, and the other doesn't: because neither does.
And the reason I raise the hp example - besides the fact that it's obvious and low-hanging fruit - is that
a large number of RPGers quit D&D in the late 70s/early 80s and moved to games like C&S, RQ, RM, DQ, etc (and later to Hero and GURPS) precisely because they objected to this feature of D&D's combat resolution.
Ron Edwards and The Forge have a technical label for these sorts of mechanics: fortune in the middle. As in, first the action is framed; then the dice are rolled (to hit and damage, in the hp case) or the mechanics otherwise applied (bonuses to attack the besieged foe, with penalties for the beseiged foe to attack the besiegers, in the War Devil case); then the narration is finalised, which involves choices about how to do that as it can't be read straightforwardly off the resolution, although the resolution does provide constraints within which the narration must fit.
As the hp example shows, D&D has always had FitM. Originally it was widespread - not only in the basic combar mechanics but saving throws, many skill-type checks (eg bend bars checks, thief abilities, searching for traps, etc - any of these, especially the ones that forbid retries, could easily in classic D&D be narrated in a FitM fashion). 3E got rid of it from saving throws and skill/ability checks but kept it for core combat resolution (this is why I, personally, find 3E to be an unstable combination of gritty and gonzo). 4e brought it in a lot of places, in ways that I personally see as generalising the general approach to resolution of classic D&D (but obviously that's not a univerasal opinion).
I think conversations about the relationships between fiction and resolution (framing checks, narrating outcomes, etc) can be quite profitable. Whereas overlaying it with descriptions of personal psychological responses ("I like this, but not this") tends to obscure the analysis. And generalising those descriptions is even more problematic: for instance, I've seen people describe some FitM mechanics as at odds with immersion as such, when I personally have participated in games that use those mechanics and have witnessed moments of great immersion during those games. For instance, some people say that a player
can't be immersed in character when s/he also has to provide the narration in the manner that FitM abilities require - ie with some constraint but some room for choice. But I know that that claim - which is an empirical one - is false, because I've seen such immersion take place. (How does it work? Because the player's inhabitation of the character, and the character's situation within the game, is so total that from the player's point of view there
is no choice - the logic of the fiction drives a single narration - even though, if we abstract the mechanics out of that particular moment of play, they didn't dictate any particular narration.)