Oh, I absolutely agree. I am in no way saying that constructive criticism (or hell, even warranted, non-constructive criticism sometimes) is fine and should be encouraged! The comments I was referring to (many have either been deleted or removed) were quite a bit less focused on constructive criticism than they were on just a barrage of insults towards the team responsible as if this decision was made intentionally just to spite them.

I think your criticism is a really good one though, especially if these link previews can be harmful towards accessibility/make basic interactions more difficult. Like I mentioned, I enabled a similar beta feature a while back that was a bit difficult to get used to, but I have grown to find indispensable. I think in the same argument, however, you can argue against any sort of hover effects on the web (drop down menus, hover animations, etc.) and to be fair, it would be hard for me to disagree with that point on many instances of that as well.