"The idea of "shaming" people producing "bad recordings" is a bit fraught."
ASR does it regularly for below par equipment from Amir's comments to the ribald remarks in the later comments from the forum contributors. I can't see why recording engineers should be exempt.
It's because they are two different things: "art" and the reproduction of the art.
IF you take the stance of Amir and many ASR members that you simply want to reproduce that artistic signal with as much fidelity as possible (and with as little distortion) then it makes sense you can point out which gear strays more or less from that goal.
But that's not the same as demanding the artist themselves conform to some goal YOU have. How would that even work?
"You can only produce sound with perfectly flat frequency response and use no form of distortion, and it must have THIS bandwidth?"
I certainly get the appreciation of, generically speaking, "good sounding recordings" (which we can generally take as sounding rich, clear, dynamic, etc). But as I say, it is indeed fraught to start demanding recordings conform in this way, for the reasons given.
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between performance quality and recording quality.
"One track will have giant in your face bass and drums, the next it sounds like they have been recorded in the back corner of a large hall, or stuffed in a close to one side of the mix, with other instruments leaping out all over the place. The sound can be thin, thick, forward, distant, and everything in between. And I love all of it...including those artistic choices and sonic idiosyncrasies."
I think in most of the above these are engineering choices rather than artistic choices.
Those choices are part of the artistic process. Everything is done so as to achieve, as best as possible, the desired sonic goal.