Interesting comparison but you fail to note that in Yzerman's first 5 seasons, the Red Wings made it to the conference final twice. That's twice more than the Leafs have in the core's first 8 years. Also, if you compare the Detroit rosters from those early conference final teams to the team that finally broke through and won the cup - almost complete turnover other than Yzerman. It didn't hurt to have Lidstrom on the back end.
So yeah, maybe the complaints were similar - but we have one big difference. You're talking about ONE player on Detroit (Yzerman) whereas the Leafs have THREE (or 4 if you count Tavares). It would be like if the Leafs only had Marner, or only Matthews, or only Nylander. But they don't, they have 3 (or 4) and significant weaknesses in the rest of the roster because of it. So the idea of balancing out the roster by moving out one of them really shouldn't be something that people are so quick to label "nonsense".