Unfortunately there are cultures where interpersonal relationships are more personalized than in others: where people (generally) understand any criticism as targeting the self (that mysterious whole) and not the idea/point.

Work meetings are one way rhetoric in such parts, famously boring and result in as much creativity as the authority has. Usually less civilized places posses a weaker level of abstraction. (When everything is urgent, nothing is hypothetical.)

So it isn't only a question of sub-optimal methods chosen by various individuals - be they politicians - to make a friendlier world, but of big groups, entire mentality groups, for which the very term "dialogue" has other boundaries. So the play-safe, good-for-all economical solution is to forbid criticism or to use extreme relativism for everything. The "holistic" conversation.

We all do it sometimes, out of interest or ignorance.