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I mean yeah, I think perhaps the cruel part here is that she was showered with money, attention, fame, and general encouragement because her shctick lined up with progressives stated values. But when it comes to actually living out those values, most people seem to pull back.
She could easily find a rationalist eligible bachelor to have kids with in her stated lifestyle. She’d just have to settle for ‘eligible’ rather than ‘attractive’(in the broad sense, rather than just a synonym for handsome).
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She was/is not showered with money, attention, fame and general encouragement exactly due to that but moreso for offering the direct possibility or at least a fantasy of sex with an attractive yet intelligent woman for the stereotypically sexless and nerdy rationalist community. It's not progressives in general who are obsessed with Aella (most would of course not even know of her and a large amount of her statements are offensive to progressives as well), it's this one particular group and its subgroups.
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I think there's perhaps a lot of truth to what you think. Giving praise and encouragement to behaviors that feel good but are long-run self-defeating is actually cruelty, not niceness.
I'm reminded of the cliche of fat/ugly women yas queen'd by her friends and being confused why no high value men want to settle down with her. Or what I'd guess is the counterpart of nice guys being praised for being meek and submissive and being confused why he gets no 1st or 2nd dates. I don't know how often either happens, but I'm pretty sure they're cliches for good reason.
Recently, in video games there have been a number of high profile failures by major AAA studios that spent the better part of decade making games that either failed spectacularly (e.g. Concord) or just did mid in sales, nowhere near enough given the dev costs (e.g. Assassin's Creed: Shadows, Dragon Age: The Veilguard), and one common talking point I saw was that these devs probably got nothing but affirmations as they were developing these disasters that appealed to themselves and almost no one in the target audience. And as a result, many of these devs face layoffs and even closure. We don't know if the narrative of internal echo chambers of affirmations is actually correct, but if it is, then these affirmations weren't nice, they weren't kind, they were cruel, for encouraging the devs to create games that would end up dooming their jobs or their studios or both.
Perhaps there are cruel ways to discourage the type of lifestyle that Aella practices. Perhaps most ways of discouragement are cruel. But that doesn't make the encouragement of such any less cruel.
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