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For what it's worth, while I agree with you entirely in your dispute with coffee_enjoyer, I would like to nitpick that this isn't true about the criterion of embarrassment.
It's true that the CoE is not treated as absolute. This is why people who deploy it as a gotcha in apologetical contexts are being dishonest. The CoE is probabilistic. In principle, if there's no clear reason to falsify something, it seems more likely to be true, but this is an educated guess based on how well we can model the beliefs and motives of an author. That's a very fallible process, so the CoE is very rarely, in biblical studies, treated as conclusive by itself. It is used alongside half a dozen other criteria to try to build up a picture of what is likely to be true.
I would note that the CoE is not always used in ways friendly to orthodox Christianity. The CoE has sometimes been used to argue in favour of the historicity of the Crucifixion, but it is always used to defend the likely historicity of, for instance, what seemed to be false or mistaken prophecies on Jesus' part. For example, the Olivet discourse infamously contains the claim that this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened (Mark 13:30). It would be highly embarrassing for Jesus to make an incorrect prophecy, and some scholars would argue that there are places in the Bible where the authors seem to be backing off or making excuses for (e.g. the Lukan Jesus chides others for seeking to know the times, or 2 Peter 3:8). The CoE would be used to argue in favour of the mistakes being real, even though this shows a fallible Jesus and is problematic for believers.
It does get used outside of biblical studies as well. My favourite example is the satanic verses - there seems to be very little reason for early Muslims to make up a story about Muhammad being misled, so is it more plausible that the event is historical? It doesn't seem totally unthinkable to suggest that Muhammad, during his lifetime, experimented a bit with optimising his message, and tested out how different ideas went down. There could be argued to be elements of early Islam that are syncretic with re-contextualised Arabian paganism (most famously the Kaaba), and there are undisputed incidents where Muhammad seems to show sympathy toward a pagan custom - the Nakhla incident, for instance, shows Muhammad apparently wanting to observe a pagan custom not to fight in the holy months, until (supposedly) God corrected him. So it seems plausible that maybe Muhammad might have once briefly experimented with incorporating pagan divinities into Islam as something like angels, then changed his mind, and the story of a Satanic suggestion was invented to cover the gap.
However, that theory is still highly speculative - wiki describes a history of debates on its historicity, some of which challenge the idea that there could be no motive other than truth for Muslims to invent the incident. The CoE is very rarely dispositive by itself!
At any rate. I would defend the CoE as having a place in historical and textual study.
I don't really disagree with any of that, but I think calling something "The criterion of embarrassment" is really just giving a lofty name to a reasoning tool that, as you say, is not dispositive by itself. An admission against self interest is a piece of evidence, but it's just one factor. It relies on assuming that our account of who claimed what is entirely accurate, that our understanding of their motives and interests is entirely accurate, and it's rarely the case that you have a single person or entity making a claim that would be unambiguously against their self interest to be believed.
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