You are completely misunderstanding the point that’s being made here.
Not wanting open season for criticism is very fundamentally not about writers viewing critique as a threat to their ego or being oversensitive. It’s about the fannish community in general deciding that posting fanfic is more like bringing a dish to a potluck than enrolling in a cooking class.
If you are taking a cooking class, every time you cook something you will get feedback/constructive criticism from the instructor and probably your fellow students. They’ll tell you what went right, what went wrong, and what you should do next time to make it work better. Because the whole point of doing it is to improve your cooking skills with the help of other people.
If you bring a dish to a potluck, the point of a potluck is to enjoy peoples’ company and eat together. If someone brings a dish that’s not very good, well, that happens. You don’t go up to them and tell them everything they should have done. You eat what you want to, pass by the stuff you don’t, and if you can’t say anything nice you don’t say anything at all. If the cook who brought the terrible dish wants to improve, they will ask for help or advice.
Maybe they’re just there for the fellowship and couldn’t care less whether they make something good or not. Maybe they just need practice. Maybe they got an inspiration that didn’t quite turn out the way they expected, but they didn’t want the food to go to waste so they brought it anyway. Maybe they were pressed for time or something went wrong, and they are usually better. Maybe it’s a new recipe and they’ve already figured out what to do next time. Maybe they don’t have the money to buy better ingredients. Maybe your ideas of what that dish “should” be like are radically different from theirs. Maybe it’s none of your business.
I’m pretty good at taking critique; I’ve taken lessons in a number of different types of endeavor, I know how it works, and if I were taking a cooking class, I’d be fine with people telling me what I can improve and how to do it.
But if I bring a dish to a potluck, and you come up to me and tell me what you think is wrong with it, I’m going to tell you not to eat it if you don’t like it, and also, stop being rude. Not because I’m “too sensitive” or “can’t take criticism” or my ego is wounded, but because you are being deeply inappropriate to the situation.
As to “when did it change” the answer will be different depending on what fannish circles you travel in. I’m pretty sure there are still fandom groups around that function like writers’ groups, it’s just that most of them are private (discord communities and the like) instead of public. I started lurking and reading fanfic in the 90s, and to the best of my recollection most places constructive criticism was only welcome if the author requested it; things were much the same in the LJ days when I started posting fic myself. Some communities never allowed criticism; some allowed it sometimes; some it was a regular thing.
But the ones where concrit was a regular thing tended to be smaller for the simple reason that “getting constructive criticism from people you know will give useful feedback” is very different from “inviting any yahoo on the internet who happens to stumble in to yell at you about what a horrible writer they think you are because you didn’t write the story they wanted” which is what happens when you’re in a more open space and allow criticism. (Even if you say “only constructive criticism,” lots of people think their ideas are constructive criticism when it really, really isn’t.)
From what I know from listening to people who were in fanfic circles before I was, part of the issue is the transition from print zines to online posting. Print zines cost money and take a lot of time to make (especially back in the era of the typewriter and the mimeograph), and so only the best stories got published. If you wanted to share your story, you had to learn to write to a certain standard of quality. And the community was fairly small, everyone knew everyone else. So critique was an important part of helping writers get good enough to get their fic in a zine and thus seen by others.
Online posting is both easier to do (so there’s no need to gatekeep who can post stories and who can’t) and easier to find (so you get a LOT more people reading, most of whom you don’t know and who may or may not have any actual clue about writing in general or the type of story you’re trying to tell). So unless you’re in a closed community, the benefits are lower and the risk of assholes shitting on you while claiming it’s “constructive criticism” is much greater. So fannish culture (by and large) changed, though again, different communities have different norms. (Sometimes very different norms.)
But it’s not about writers being sensitive. It’s about deciding that unless otherwise specified ahead of time, posting fanfic is the equivalent of bringing a dish to a potluck, not taking a cooking class.
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