He both can effectively be a 'shill' while also publishing the occasional critical article.

What makes daringfireball toothless isn't the ratio of praise to criticism. It's Gruber's occasional willingness to defend the absurd.

Can you provide an example of this?

Skimming the daringfireball archive (https://daringfireball.net/archive) there's around one post every couple months I would choose as an example, but... there is no way to quantify exactly how 'absurd' any specific example is, so it would be inherently a frustrating discussion.

This doesn't really serve as an example.