Yes and yes. Well, at least its not normal but its not uncommon. At times one gets the feeling that it goes beyond just defensive holders of other alts and looks more like organized FUD campaigns (I've even heard rumours of paid fudders, although I can't confirm it). Its nearly as bad as politics sometimes.

I think its a mixture of three things:

Firstly you get people who are defensive about competition for their favourite alt. In the early days the NEU team reached out to some other coin communities like DOGE with the idea of an 'airdrop' giving free coins to the owners of those other alts, and that really seemed to get people's backs up (particularly DOGE since tipping and micropayments were kind of their thing) and seemed to coincide with the height of the venom when the official forum was almost entirely just angry hate posts.

Secondly you get a lot of idealistic people who have very 'purist' ideas about what a crypto should do and object to one being run like a start-up, kind of seeing it as the enemy impinging on their anarchic territory.

Thirdly you get a lot of immature people who buy the coins without doing any research on them, find out later on that its different to what they had thought and then shout loudly about being ripped off because of that, or because they didn't make a fortune overnight (which unfortunately is what some people expect when they start buying crypto).

You have people in this thread still going on about the distribution - everybody knew what this was going to be before the pre-sale, the reasons why were explained fully, the intended timeline for the foundation to go below 50% was provided, but yet instead of choosing whether they are interested or not and then acting accordingly they keep posting in this forum thread for month after month about how the distribution of coins is a scam. It should be clear that this is not because they have an honest opinion, but because they have an axe to grind.