I don't know anything about Thom, but I've kind of grown to prefer the pissy opinionated tones of blog posts. I think impartiality is difficult or impossible for a lot of tasks, and I'd rather people lay out their opinions plainly than trying to pretend that what they're saying is "objective".
Also, I think writing only when you have things to criticize is a valid enough thing to do; what's the point of writing a glorified "I agree!" article?
I only ever blog when I have something that I think is unique to say, and as such a lot of the time my posts end up being kind of negative. I don't think I'm that negative of a person, I just don't see the point of flooding the internet with more echo-chambers.
I like his tone too. It also is easier to identify that it isn’t LLM generated text.
(I have nothing against LLMs but have little interest in reading text generated from them.)
It's one thing when it's the Associated Press, where they are trying to be a somewhat impartial source of news and reporting raw facts to the best of their ability; stuff like that probably should not have an opinionated tone at all.
But I think for things like blogs, without opinions being clear, posts can feel kind of soulless. Even before LLMs I felt that way, and now it has been amplified ten fold with people just cranking out low-effort posts with ChatGPT for reasons that I do not understand.
When I write stuff for my blog, I like to think of it as a time capsule of the entirety of the thing I'm writing about. This doesn't just include the raw subject matter, but also my mood and opinions about the subject matter. I'm egotistical enough to occasionally read through my old posts and the ones that I like the best are the ones where I feel like I was expressing myself the most, and where I make no effort whatsoever to try and be impartial.