The author is using "cringe" as something of a euphemism here. "Cringe" in this case is
anything that a person could say that would cause other people to think badly of them, including highly offensive things, so long as the person saying it doesn't fully understand why. It doesn't have to be universally cringey, like watching someone do really bad karaoke. It might only be cringey within a small subculture.
Say you're used to discussing programming languages. You and your fellows have developed a well-understood notion of why static typing is better than dynamic typing. Then along comes some fool who has watched too many Rich Hickey videos who wants to tell you that types are just guard rails and nobody would navigate by bouncing off the guard rails when they could just drive to their destination. This is cringey because you've heard this argument before, the interloper ought to know that you've heard this before and taken it into account, and it's clear that they're just repeating some argument that they've heard somewhere else.
One could have a "stupid things dynamic typers say" bingo-card, with the guard rail argument on it. One could regard the dynamic typer as a kind of NPC bot, popping up to spout the scripted phrases of his kind of person. And it's cringey to watch someone do that.
This phenomenon is what the OP is trying to describe, except that on Twitter the subject matter is unlikely to be static vs. dynamic types, but something political which covers much larger categories of people.
The fact that so many commenters here are baffled by this suggests that the phenomenon, or at least this intuitive understanding of it, is not quite as widespread as the OP (and I!) might assume, though.
Say you're used to discussing programming languages. You and your fellows have developed a well-understood notion of why static typing is better than dynamic typing. Then along comes some fool who has watched too many Rich Hickey videos who wants to tell you that types are just guard rails and nobody would navigate by bouncing off the guard rails when they could just drive to their destination. This is cringey because you've heard this argument before, the interloper ought to know that you've heard this before and taken it into account, and it's clear that they're just repeating some argument that they've heard somewhere else.
One could have a "stupid things dynamic typers say" bingo-card, with the guard rail argument on it. One could regard the dynamic typer as a kind of NPC bot, popping up to spout the scripted phrases of his kind of person. And it's cringey to watch someone do that.
This phenomenon is what the OP is trying to describe, except that on Twitter the subject matter is unlikely to be static vs. dynamic types, but something political which covers much larger categories of people.
The fact that so many commenters here are baffled by this suggests that the phenomenon, or at least this intuitive understanding of it, is not quite as widespread as the OP (and I!) might assume, though.