You see, I don't even disagree with most of what you said. My issue is not with discerning Kaur's work as poor within a certain frame of understanding. I'm absolutely aware that her work is bad under consideration of academic principles. I would not write an essay at my university defending her "quality" against other canonical works. Still, canon is not canon just because it's "good" but because of a vast sum of events. Arguing against that seems to be reductionist. The "rules" of literature are as much rules as the rules of grammar. But language is not something stiff, obviously, but something that changes all the time and that is determined, among many other things, by (power-)relations. It's not "just there" because it's true. If that was the case, it wouldn't change. I found this Tedx by Kory Stamper of Merriam Webster fame to be a breath of fresh air - and it goes very well together with my university mostly rejecting a prescriptivist study of language.

if it can be explained and its depth is honest. It also doesn't take a genius to figure out that Kaur doesn't take poetry seriously. While reciting poetry, she actively misrecites her work

Sure, I don't know her very well and you might as well be right about this. But my problem with this statement is best formulated with Norman Malcolm who saw a limitation with dream research and said:

The only criterion of the truth of a statement that someone has had a certain dream is, essentially, his saying so.

And, well, the same goes for motives and/or people taking things seriously. I'm not saying that we have to take everyone seriously all the time, but in the end, by saying she doesn't take things seriously, you're making a statement that you just cannot prove and that lies upon a set of assumptions you (a subject) made. I think I could come up with a hundred explanations of why someone might frequently misrecite their own work.

That's what I mean when I say intention and consequence are not necessarily connected. Sure, it's useful to judge in many situations. But judgement doesn't, at least in my book, make much sense in this case. Because I do not see the merit of "objectively" invalidate Rupi Kaur, because you can invalidate all you want, people will still like her and people will still call it poetry. You cannot do anything about that and you never will. This is a classic example of the Discourse of the Master in Lacan's psychoanalysis.

And, it's okay to say that! It is not unfair to call her work anything. It is not unfair to criticize anyone.
Yes, it is okay to criticize, I never said nobody can criticize her. It's about the way some criticize her. Not because I particularly care about "fairness" in this case (I only mentioned it because you did) but simply because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to try and invalidate a poet when you could study other poets you like or create some poetry yourself.

This never pays off, of course, because her words are shallow and her execution is passionless. (...)Criticism of work is not personal, it’s just observational.

See, this seems a lot like an argument based solely on your emotions toward her. In my understanding of literature (and language in general) as being performative, a book has no inherent meaning that is to be interpreted and scraped out but is created within the person reading it. A book without anyone reading (and obviously writing) it has no content. It would be just empty letters. It gets its content by being read (also by being written, yeah, but writing exist without reading it). And as such passion or shallowness are not things to be found in a text, but within yourself by reading it.