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Most of these reviews are just anger-venting tirades where players try to compare an unstable+vanilla 1.0 with a stable+(usually) heavily-modded B18 that they've been so accustomed to.

I really hope Tynan doesn't let the vocal minority dissuade him.

I think the reason behind a lot of the frustration is the fact that many people treat Rimworld as a basebuilding game. That's not to say that the game doesn't have basebuilding elements (cause it obviously does), but their goal is to create the "perfect" colony that lives forever and is large enough to support massive colony growth. They don't create a new colony thinking "will my group be able to survive these future hardships?" but rather "I can't wait to make this massive symmetric 200x200 base with a perfect trap-maze killbox surrounding the perimeter."

This view applies to colonists as well. Due to skill decay and passions, people assign roles to each colonist to do specific tasks. This means their view of a "perfect" colony is shattered when their lv 20 constructor dies, which tempts them to reload a previous save.

Additionally, there seems to be this idea floating around that not playing on the hardest difficulty is considered "weak" or "casual." This only exacerbates the frustration that these players feel because the increased difficulty level is much less forgiving during instances of bad RNG.

Getting back to the discussion at hand, I think the current design is fine because I play Rimworld as a story-generating survival game. I usually play on Cassandra Hard or Extreme on tribal starts with my main focus being "how long can I survive?" For this style of play, the current design works very well as the story would be boring if there were no setbacks. For this reason, I never reload previous saves or use dev mode, but I can definitely understand the mentality of players that do since their goals in the game are different than mine.