It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.
Sure. But not in the debate itself.
That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.
There are 5 of what are called "stock issues" that are the basis for judging a round, and the affirmative side must win all of them to take the round. The negative side need only win one.
One of those stock issues is "topicality." The affirmative wins topicality as an issue by affirming the resolution. The negative is not so bound. This leads to an absolutely classical negative strategy called the "counter-plan." Essentially, what this is is a strategy where, rather than the negative simply saying "nuh uh" to the affirmative's points, they put forth their own plan and argue that it is better than the affirmative's plan.
There is some thought that the negative counterplan must explicitly be non-topical, i.e. not advocate for the resolution. So, for instance, the the resolution might be something like "Resolved: That the United States government should reduce worldwide pollution through its trade and/or aid policies," which was actually the 1992-1993 high school policy debate resolution. The negative could argue that the US should reduce worldwide pollution by means other than trade and/or aid policy, or that the US should do something completely unrelated to pollution reduction, because that action would create bigger benefits than the affirmative plan.
For this strategy to work, it's best if the counterplan and the affirmative plan are mutually exclusive, so it's a common strategy to simply hijack the affirmative plan's funding plank to make it all work.
Absolutely none of this is any sort of bad faith tactic. An affirmative team must always be prepared to argue a comparative advantage case. As I said, this is completely bog-standard, classical policy debate strategy, and in no way constitutes bad faith. But, yet, because the negative has no duty to be topical (and, indeed, could possibly be more convincing if they are explicitly non-topical), they might spend half their time talking about something not mentioned at all in the resolution.
As a college admissions officer or employer, if this is what the endeavor had degenerated to, I would place no stock in it as a skill builder or source of any reputable credential.
So you have no idea what you're talking about.
Better yet: "this is atypical in-group power play: the misuse of authority in the absence of substance is de facto perpetuation of the institutional dysfunction laid clear by outsiders."
Which "k" is that?
Your arguments is basically a mediocre elitism K,
The style of "critique is inherently bad" argument made by this article is also perfectly possible to make within debate. But it's not common, less because of biased judges (who certainly exist, in all directions) than because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well in context. Policy debate isn't a great truth-finding endeavor, but it is ruthlessly competitive and as a result pretty effective at weeding out arguments that, like the article's, rely on a low-context audience who have heard a lot about out of control woke college students but haven't just watched a bunch of rounds of vigorous dispute over everything from hypothetical policy details to the boundaries of the year's topic to, yes, critical theory, with practiced advocates on every side.
(Also, even that isn't an instant-win button! Any decent debater can spin an actually-you're-the-imperialist argument in almost any circumstances, and sadly paying attention to judge biases is also routine. And FWIW at something like a state championship tournament there are a lot more normie judges who won't vote for a K, no matter how well argued, than there are Maoists.)