Until demonstrated otherwise, I'm going to assume these aren't actual quotes from actual people, and certainly not anything actually posted in this thread. Which goes back to my earlier point about leaving out the weakest arguments trying to demonstrate that both sides are the same.
But that seems to be sidestepping my point. Which is that nobody's claiming "both sides are the same". (neither in the specific flaws, nor the degree to which those flaws exists)
If the rule is
"As long as the GOP is worse, any criticism of the GOP can never be counterbalanced to any degree with criticism of Democrats (as a means of explaining which blind spots they have with regards to electability in certain regions), and should be viewed as
both-sides'ism and thus disregarded. (which is often assessed by people through a very myopic lens)
Then it's really a distinction without a difference.
To reframe my previous post, think of it as each person having a threshold of "flaw allowances".
Each person has, let's say, 10 flaw points they're willing to make allowances for the sake of keeping things simple
That covers both policy flaws (things people disagree with you on) as well as personality flaws (obnoxious behaviors)
Then end result is that people are willing to tolerate more obnoxious behavior on the personality front, as long as the there aren't as many strikes on the policy front (and vice versa) before it hits their threshold of "nope, I can't go along with them".
For example, a candidate/party who's an 8 on the "obnoxious-o-meter", but has 90% alignment on key policy is going to be more
net-palatable to someone than a person who's only a 3 on the "obnoxious-o-meter", but disagrees with them on 80% of the issues they see as "key issues".
To highlight what I'm talking about, if we were to ask people in deep blue areas who'd they rather vote for, Beto O'Rourke vs Mitt Romney... I'm assuming they'd say the former, despite the the fact that Beto is definitely more obnoxious and Mitt Romney is about as controversial/provocative as a breakfast of plain white toast and oatmeal.
The reason for that? Romney loses too many points on the policy front in their eyes and they'd have a much higher "bovine excrement threshold" for O'Rourke since he agrees with them on a lot more on various policy issues.
So if a democrat (in response to someone saying something about O'Rourke's outbursts during TX press conferences) said "yeah, well what about that time Romney did XYZ", it wouldn't be fair to simply disregard their rebuttal as "both sides'ing" (at least not if it's someone interested in "how can we get these folks on to vote for our team"), it should be viewed as "these are the tweaks required if we want get that person to vote for us"
A more real world example:
While many of us wouldn't see a midwestern state college putting a "pronoun guidelines" section in their handbook as being "as extreme as" a state government opting to ban books, if people are regularly mentioning the former as a rebuttal to a thread about the latter, that's their way of saying "on this particular topic, you're at an 8 and you'll need to bring it down to a 3 if you want our vote", and that's probably something that shouldn't be immediately dismissed (that is, if people don't want to lose "gettable" states in federal elections)