The reason a very small subset of users love it*

All the downloads making it the top app in the app stores are from people using their centralized service. The people behind these downloads have no clue that you can run it locally or can even start to understand what that would even mean. It is this usage the article is addressing.

Like the thread starter, I am also confused to why this in particular draws so much hate.

Yeah, me too. It is quick and easy. I use SyncThing for things I want to keep synced.

Yeah, I tried this, and it works from my session, but I still got the same error from trying to run the program. I figured it was because it is called outside the bash session so the run commands have not been run, but is that perhaps not true?