The Krakauer feud/was-McCandless-an-idiot thing is AMAZING, and at this point it's been going on for 20 years and people have developed obsessive levels of devotion to their point of view, on both sides. There is a McCandless cult, basically, for whom McCandless is their Wilderness Messiah and how dare anyone speak ill of him. (These are the people who tend to show up at the bus on pilgrimages and then need to be rescued. At one point the state was either going to remove the schoolbus, or had already done it -- I forget how that turned out -- so they could stop sending helicopters out there to rescue lost hikers.)

And then there are the "McCandless was an idiot" people, and like you pointed out, the hardcore version of this is essentially "he got what he deserved" which -- no! Nobody deserves to starve to death in the wilderness at the age of 22 or whatever! Granted, you can always do things that make it a lot less likely. But like you said, that wasn't who he was, and lots of other people ALSO do that kind of thing and survive. If he'd walked back out of the wilderness again three months later, everyone would've thought he was totally hardcore.