It's bad game design if it were the game, but it's not the game. You said "that's not a good puzzle. It's not good game design. It's antagonistic to the player in the worst possible way."

But it's not really a puzzle, or the game, or antagonizing you, because there's no purpose in doing it. Like I said, it's just something that exists in the game. It's not the game; it doesn't reflect upon the puzzle design or the game design because it's irrelevant to the actual puzzles and the actual game.

I'll repeat myself: if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds. If that happened in Call of Duty, it would be strange, but it also would have nothing to do with the game design quality of Call of Duty. It would not make sense to say Call of Duty has bad game design due to the presence of this thing.

I'm defending the witness because it's a good game, and this comment thread implies that doing that dumb thing is required to play or finish the game, when it is not. It is a misleading comment that gives an uninformed reader an incorrect impression of the product.