First of all, are they bad is a completely different question from do they cause harassment, but alright, let's take a look at those topics shall we?
http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/12/t...-bad-for-mmos/ Is a series of rhetorical questions from a crafter's blog based on a comment they saw on a different thread. There are no comments on this thread to answer their self-serving rhetorical questions.
http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...eters-bad.html Everyone in this thread disagrees with the op.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/11547145531 This person says they've always been against parsers and have been playing WoW since beta. The post is made in 2014. That's a lot of play time. They say they've had 3 incidents with dps meters. 3. By 2014, since the beta. And that's from a person who's obviously trying their best to make meters sound bad, and all they can come up with is 3 incidents. (also pretty much everyone disagrees with this op as well)
3 more of the links are for ffxiv, which just further my point that this community is way more obsessed with meters than other communities. We don't even have a parser but we have more threads about parser harassment on the front page than other mmos.
Then there are 2 topics near the bottom of the page of people asking for meters.
Some of the sub-topics from the WoW recount topics are people asking how they can get better dps.
I remain unconvinced. I'm sure you've had the discussion more than once, and sure the topic exists, but it's not nearly as widespread as you seem to think. ffxiv has a weird fixation on it, way more than other mmos.