I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.
> Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress marginalized communities. Engineering is always political.
Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.
Everyone thinks what they do is right. Ill-intentioned refers to whether the characterizer thinks it was right, not the actor.
How does that have anything to do with whether he was horrible? In general, people think they're doing the right thing. That doesn't mean they're not horrible.
As one of his friends described him: "He's so forthright and honest that if he saw a man across the street who he thought was a son of a bitch, he would cross the street and call him a son of a bitch, lest by passing him in silence, his silence be misconstrued".