Yeah, 90% of the time someone says pothole and I hear "The story didn't spoon feed me the answer and I'm inexplicably mad about it."

In another thread just today I was pointing out that this is the result of the Cinema Sins school of criticism taking over the average person's relationship with media. People seem to genuinely think that how good or bad something is comes down to tallying up "plot holes" to come up with a sin score and calling it a day.

Plot holes are fine. Even legitimate plot holes are fine; if a story actually captures your attention and holds your emotional engagement, you won't be thinking about plot holes because you'll be too busy enjoying the story. This is Hitchcock described as Fridge Logic; problems that only occur to you hours after the movie is over and you're staring into the refrigerator trying to decide what snack to make (yes, that's the actual origin of the term). And he was very much of the opinion that this was absolutely fine; as long as any apparent inconsistency wasn't so egregious as to break suspension of disbelief right there in the moment, it could be safely ignored.

When people fixate on minor plot holes it's either because a) fundamentally the story sucks, so their mind is wandering, or b) they've trained themselves to constantly find or invent logic holes instead of actually trying to engage with what the storytelling is doing.