Or you just hold onto a completely different set of identity politics to the critics in question.
The vast majority of the world's population does not holt into any form of "identity politics".
Identity politics is a very recent and very Anglo-American thing that has no existence outside of Anglo-America from 1990 to 2019. It is a derivative of Marxism that emerged in recent decades and has deeply influenced the mentality of liberal-arts type people in Anglophone countries and some journalists elsewhere. In Japan, for instance, there is no such thing. In Brazil we have a little bit of identity politics creeping up among people who are easily influenced by American media.
Besides, it's not like artistic value and political ideology are mutually exclusive concepts - the latter can definitely impact the former so it's not like professional critics are conformists for taking that into account while assessing a film.
Identity politics is not a typical form of political ideology, it is a totalitarian ideology. A totalitarian ideology is such that is dominates the totality of a persons' though. In that case, a movie critic will be unable to tolerate any deviations from the "party-line" and will lash out at any perceived deviations. That is exactly what happened with the reviewer I quote above.
Totalitarian ideologies are enemies of art because art is communication between individuals: art is individual expression and totalitarian ideologies do not tolerate out any form of individual expression that does not conform to the "party line". Which greatly restricts artistic expression.
For example, Anglo-American identity politics regard as intolerable the depiction of a female cyborg that looks thin or a gay man who suffered problems in his personal life because of his homosexuality.
"Did not press the idea"? They treated his bisexuality as a (quite literally fatal) character flaw that's often showcased in a negative light (most memorably when he meets his life partner by groping him), which definitely comes across as disrespectful of his legacy as a queer icon no matter how many grandstanding performances of Queen's greatest hits get crammed into the gaps.
See? That is an exact example of totalitarian ideology in action right now: you find it intolerable to depict some things that, well, happen to gay people.
When I saw the movie I just saw it as a depiction of the hardships a gay man had to go through in the 1970s and 1980s. Yes, it was not easy to be gay back in the 1970s and 1980s. To depict that fact is disrespectful? I never saw anything remotely homophobic in the movie. In fact, I think that depicting Freddie as an LGBT activist first and as "Freddie, the artist" second would be the true insult, which is exactly what movie critics expected.
There's more to considering a film's identity politics than just pointing out surface-level stuff like "sexism bad", especially considering how much of Alita's premise, world-building, and characterisation is rooted in exploring ideological concepts like class warfare and transhumanism (it's been interesting to see that some of the counterarguments I've seen against the aforementioned "new body" complaint have actually come about as a result of reading Alita's journey as an expression of transgender identity, which is better than just saying it's good simply because it doesn't acknowledge sexism in its movie).
Alita is not really concerned with "class warfare". That is a Marxist reading of the movie or the manga.
What the manga shows is that there exist a floating city where people are well-off and a dirty city at the "bottom" where people are not well-off. Although I thought that in both the manga and the movie the difference between scrapyard and Zalen is the difference between living in developed or developing countries and not really about social stratification since Zalen and scrapyard/Iron City are two separate societies. People in scrapyard dream about going to Zalen in the same way that people in Africa and Latin America dream about migrating to Anglo-America or Europe. Anyway, the existence of social stratification does not imply in the existence of "class consciousness" much less "class struggle", which are ultimately a Marxist fictions.
Aita and transsexuality? What? I read all the 30+ volumes of the manga published over the past 30 years and there was never a hint of anything about transsexuality in it. I guess the movie's take on transhumanism would have more relevance on the obesity epidemic that occurs in North America as transhuman cyborgs in the movie never looked overweight (although there are some overweight looking cyborgs in the manga).
How? Badly-reviewed films succeed all the time - the same goes for well-reviewed films that flop. I don't know why it's somehow the critics' fault that audiences don't 100% agree with their assessments of which films are good.
The social role of a movie critic is to provide information to the prospective audience about the quality of the movies available. Information should be relevant to the prospective audience by informing the audience about movies they might enjoy before they watched it.
For example, when I read critics reviews of Alita I felt like reading a vegan's criticism of a steakhouse. How relevant is the opinion of a vegan regarding a steakhouse to the prospective public for the steakhouse? The critics reviewing movies like Alita or Bohemian Rhapsody are clearly not part of the movie's target audience, their criticism is only a reflection of that, their words have little resemblance to what the movies are trying to achieve.
When movie critics are approaching a movie without taking into account what the movie wants to do and what the audience might want from the movie they are not doing their job. Alita is not trying to be a neo-Marxist piece of identity politics, it is trying to be a science fiction visual effects-driven action movie. Movie critics are unable or unwilling to evaluate what it is trying to be and so they are not being competent.
Of course, some people argue that the role of a movie critic is not that: That critics should measure the "artistic value" of a movie. However, artistic value has no objective existence outside of the interaction between the movie and its target audience.