Personally speaking, I prefer the approach of treating fluffies as “animals marketed as toys”. I know a few artists and writers who have taken this approach, and doing so allows exploration of the themes of Life being privatized or treated as a corporate product. Its a common theme in cyberpunk/genepunk, and with the level of genetic engineering fluffy ponies suggest, I think making them more animalistic and giving them animal traits allows one to explore natural instincts, whether they’re good or bad.
That said, I am not against a treatment of fluffies as pure biotoys. By pure biotoys I am thinking of the replicant from Blade Runner, which was the approach people like Meh and Ferroter went with. It is an approach that I have explored in Muthu, and I think there is some merit to exploring a canon where fluffies are a synthetic lifeform incapable of negative traits and have to rely on a programming, the type that would need tech support.
The reason why I share Fox’s opinions on hellgremlins, even though I do like to explore “fluffies as animals” is because there was enough instances of people gatekeeping and pushing a certain hivecanon of fluffies “as being the worst aspects of humanity” to the extent that they kept harassing other content creators including hugboxers. Granted, I also blame this on an overabundance of abuse, but I suppose the real problem was a general lack of civility in the culture of the booru.
The way I see Fox’s post here is that it is critique. All too often, and perhaps even now, abusers will post a picture showing how hugboxers are wrong, or why fluffies are really undeserving of any love or sympathy. Thus, Fox’s picture here shows how hellgremlins are a deliberate exaggeration of the negative aspects of fluffies, made to be something genuinely hated. That said, and given a recent discussion I’ve had a discord, I think people are free to have whatever headcanon or preferences they have with fluffies - they just need to be civil about it and not harass others. (And yes, this may apply to both sides, but I’m pretty sure abusers were more likely to harass hugboxers)