Definitely this.
One thing that I think can be quite interesting in this topic is revisiting the same thing at different ages, decades apart, and seeing how differently or similarly you react to all or part of it. Can really reveal what mattered to you about something, or where you were being driven by perhaps non-rational feelings about stuff.
I'm currently re-watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and seeing a lot of this. Some characters I found intensely dislikeable or distressing as a teenager are much more understandable as an aging adult, but others it becomes obvious that no, that is actually bad behaviour, even looking at it from a 40-something perspective. I always wondered if I was being too hard on Buffy's mom about some stuff as a kid, but as an adult I can see she's a real "helicopter parent" (something I didn't even have a term for back then) in both senses of the term and a bit more self-indulgent and "standard procedure"-focused than most parents I knew growing up (and particularly more than ones I know today, who are my age!), even after all is revealed.
It's also interesting to see how certain things which seemed fine then did not age well, but other things did, or even were ahead of their time.
And I think one of the reasons that emerges for why the show is so likeable to me is that it is really pretty relatable in a lot of ways, especially there's something about Buffy herself and the constant frustrations and often surprisingly uncontrived misunderstandings or half-understandings she deals with that makes her relatable. The writing, whilst very 1990s, also holds up surprisingly well. Comparing it to TV series today directly, it's clear writing hasn't really improved since that era, in fact, it's relatively rare to see shows which are as well-written as Buffy often is (and that might seem like a low bar but there we are).
In fact looping back on "uncontrived", I am genuinely a little surprised because I remembered the show as being more contrived than this - there is some contrivance, and you can see a lot of places where if Buffy and friends had mobile phones (as I did at that time, current on S3), things would have been simple, but that wasn't a contrivance in the US back then - relatively few people did have them, and surprisingly major places in the US had poor or no cellphone coverage - perhaps something I didn't realize at the time (generally it seems like the US was like, 3-4 years behind much of Western Europe here, and we were behind Scandinavia, Japan and South Korea).
Yup. It's important to realize that sometimes you like things that aren't very good and not to be too defensive about it. Sometimes a specific criticism may be dead wrong, and that's fair to push back against but everything has flaws. Except Deep Space 9. Obviously. < pushes Profit and Lace under the carpet with a broom >
I like criticising things I enjoy (call me perverse but...), and am not a true "fan" of much (maybe just Mass Effect and Star Trek), so I think it's bit easier for me than some people, who reach "fan" levels of adoration more easily (nothing wrong with that, note, I wish I could sometimes). Sometimes the flaws make something better too in certain ways. Sometimes they really don't though!
