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Nah nah, it's not a negative term to most people. There's definitions ranging from booth "judgement about booth negative and positive qualities" and "the act of judgement usually negative". The first one feels like the more common usage currently, and also what you used.

Me disliking the term is mostly because the word has been used for "insanely long opinion pieces that are surprisingly negative". Imagine a book called "Critique of Pikmin 4's Artstyle" spending 500 whole pages explaining why the Author dislikes the Artstyle, with a mere 10 Sentences saying very small positives, and 30 pages saying it is objectively bad.
I've kinda seen too much of that recently to like that word... But that's just me personally and I understand that. So you did not upset me in the slightest.

I also think praising positive things without giving any improvements wanted is one of the most helpful kinds of feedback.
Of course there's always endless lists of improvements people can give you. But those lists will differ from person to person. You will then have to decide which part of the "list of improvements" actually fits what you're wanting to do.
Recently I showed off a Boss-Battle-Project on a local Convention. And I did have such a situation.
Many people had an issue with their depth perception on a specific attack. But one of the people, which was more in my target audience, did not. And they also said that was kinda the point of the attack (which is 100% true). My reaction to that was slightly cleaning up the attacks visuals. It wasn't to take one extreme side, but to just see what fits the type of game I wanna make. Which is a Boss fight that has some pretty patterns where you gotta look closely what is happening, while not being "figure out which of these 20000 bullets is going to hit you in .5 seconds - THE GAME".

In contrast those "lists of things that are great" are things people already liked. You don't need to do any complex weighting of your options, different opinions people had and the goal of your project. You just got the thing that people liked, which you (probably) already know how to do, and now you can do more stuff like that. And if you didn't notice that aspect and don't know how exactly it got in: GREAT! YOU JUST FOUND A NEW WAY TO ENJOY YOUR OWN THING!!!

This also reminded me to ask more directly what people liked about my projects. I kinda didn't do that on the convention because I wanted to focus on ironing out mistakes and stuff. But I do wanna have a focus on what people liked when I am reviewing gameplay and opinions.
So writing this overly lengthy comment helped me get those thoughts sorted out. So thanks for that, hopefully it can help ya too and didn't take too long to read.