Heard the same thing about added force being what’s really bad, and that makes sense.

For what it’s worth, I used to do the hand under chin thing with my head sideways to crack my neck, and after a while I felt like I was sore and chasing relief more often than when I built up that habit. After looking into it I found that this exercise helped with that and other sources of neck pain, and instead of doing the chin thing when I felt tight, I started doing this and have felt much better with the added bonus of not risking any kind of self-inflicted injury, even if that would be a pretty rare occurrence.