There is too much negativity on the Internet, but there's also too much of just about everything else. The ease of publishing on the Internet means that people don't think too critically about their work prior to publishing it.

For example, if these guys were publishing this benchmark as part of a study or argument in a quarterly magazine -- and this was there only opportunity to publish it for the next year or so -- then they would have been far more critical of their own work prior to publishing it. Instead they've quickly thrown together something and pushed it onto the Internet without too much further thought.

So long as it is civil, criticism is fine.

To some extent this is like a peer-review. If I submit a paper to a journal, should my response to all criticism be, "Well, if you think I didn't do the experiment right, then you do it!"