"Nothing is any good if other people like it."

Isn't Gladwell's crime being too popular? And perhaps honing his style of writing so much that it seems like a pastiche of itself?

I think perhaps some people wanted reading Gladwell-esque pop-intellectual books to mark them out as sophisticated, and that stops working when you realize that everyone has read them. Perhaps Gladwell just personifies that effect.

In a way, performatively declaring Gladwell is a midwit writer is classic midwit behaviour. The next escalation in the opinion arms race is to declare that a sophisticated reading proves Gladwell is actually a genius.