I feel like there’s just some techies who consider these applications essential to their whole life and being, while most others have not much use for them.

In this case, I agree that the downvotes are undeserved, because they only talked about their own needs.
But yeah, my gut reaction was to get angry, too, due to association with some jackasses who will vehemently argue that Linux as a whole is not useful (not even for decidedly non-power-users), because clearly everyone unquestionably needs Photoshop and Excel.