If your blood sugar is low, then eating/drinking stuff with a high glycemic index can be very good for you. For instance after heavy exercising.
You might think it is obvious, but people like simplistic things, so "sugar is bad for you, mmkay" is what most people believe nowadays rather than having a basic understanding of such fairly simple aspects of nutrition.
It’s just bad in general. Yes, there are corner case, like athletes, where in moderate quantities it is useful.
Don't get me wrong: In most of those cases eating something else would be better, but that does not make sugar 'bad in general'. Nutrition discourse does not benefit from such bad and misleading vilifications and simplifications. It causes people to think in 'silver bullets' and distrust science and government when that silver bullet turns out not to work.
Ok, let’s say “worse than other foods” then, if you dislike the word “bad”.
Getting hit on the foot with a sledgehammer is bad for you. But it's better than getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer. Using "better than" here does not make the former good for you, however.
That's how language works. It is important to be precise, for earlier mentioned reasons.
My point was, I do not see a contradiction between the two, hence I do not understand why you are stating is cannot be “bad”.
White meat is not as good as an egg. It "bad" too by this logic.
White bread is not too far away from sugar, like alcohol, actually. Replacing white bread with something full grain would also be something "good" for your diet – although in some places it's really hard to find full grain bread that doesn't taste like parchment, so maybe a not-so-low-hanging fruit ;)
Finally, I think I am compounding the refined sugar and the sugar lobby itself, who has been pushing for decades that what is bad for health is fat, whereas study after study proved otherwise.