The issue isn't that the latter is judging you and the former isn't. It's that, in the latter example, the person is evaluating you based on what they can get out of you; that is, they only value you based on how much they can exploit you. That's the reason people are responding negatively to this tough love stuff. Tough love is only "love" if it allies with healthy impulses inside you, working for your own behalf. Even then, it has to be respectful of your own sense of agency. Otherwise, you just have a form of social coercion. That's all I was saying in that first post that you apparently found demeaning, just in more pretentious language.