I agree with all your points. All of these things can be healthy. In fact, at one job, I started a weekly meeting that specifically excluded management so that

I agree with all your points. All of these things can be healthy. In fact, at one job, I started a weekly meeting that specifically excluded management so that the individual contributors could get together, talk about what was bothering us, and present a unified face to management about the things we wanted/didn't want/were happy or unhappy about. Kind of a mini-union. But a big part of the reason I did that was because there were some pervasively negative people on the team who were dragging the rest of us down. We needed a solution to the legitimate concerns that were actually doing something good for us. But what we needed even more than that was a way to shut down people who were turning every code review into a critique of the CEO and how much better of a job that person could do if s/he were in charge of everything. Having that little mini-union made it really easy to shut that down by just saying, "Good point. Let's make sure to talk about it on Tuesday at our weekly." and those people didn't feel sidelined or ignored. My point wasn't that all negativity is bad or unhealthy. It's that there's a certain type of person that can have bad effects on a team, and that you can identify that person based on certain characteristics. And being a true believer in "Total Honesty" is one of them.