Her criticisms of violin plots seem to be (1) they combine histogram-style information with box-plot-style information, when you generally would only want one or the other [ie: don't use boxplot for bimodal, don't use histogram when boxplot suffices], (2) The histogram-style information is not comparable between blobs of data, since they're not visually aligned, have no tick marks, etc — a plain histogram is better for this, and (3) she finds them ugly on a personal level.
EDIT: Maybe she'd be fine with using them in an exploratory manner. She seems to mainly be complaining about using them in publications, meant for other people to consume. Also: I did not watch the entire video (:
Thanks for this summary! I definitely hadn't seen the point about comparability between blobs of data because of the alignment. But that really seems like an odd point to me, as I almost entirely see / use these with time series data, where pretty much the whole point is to compare the evolution of the values over time using their "vertical" location, with a was to see the shape of a distribution of values at each point in time, at a glance.
EDIT: Maybe she'd be fine with using them in an exploratory manner. She seems to mainly be complaining about using them in publications, meant for other people to consume. Also: I did not watch the entire video (: