I pop in to the Chapo discord and there's always at least one guy who is die-hard "Aktuly the F-35 is a really good program and the naysayers are just in the bag for the F-22, so you shouldn't listen to them."
Incidentally, I've also heard all the critics of Boeing are being paid by Airbus.
There's inevitably a take that amounts to "There's a secret shadowy organization behind the news article telling you the F-35 is bad, and its intentions are even worse!"
But the end result is a pedantic argument over some functionally unknowable question of which overpriced, badly engineered Pentagon vanity project is the biggest waste of money. Less MIC leg-humping and more "Um, aktuly, you've fallen for Pentagon 11D chess!" contrarianness.
I'm in the bag for the damn F-16. It should have never been abandoned, they should have just built hundreds and hundreds of the things with robot brains.
More seriously, they do have F-16s with robot brains. They're called Predators and they're terrifying, particularly when employed inside a defensive perimeter.
But they're not great at power projection. F-22s/35s are built for extended range.