I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong in this specific case, but basically every change in every single sport ever is treated by the participants and "serious fans" as a horrible idea that will be the death of the sport.

Sometimes changes really are bad and are reverted, but more often the changes eventually get accepted and years later everyone involved treats it as an integral part of the sport.

Even "serious fans" almost always seem to be biased by the state of the sport when they started watching. Every change since that point is horrible and misguided, but they rarely argue for reverting changes that happened before then.