I haven't been to Whistling Straits, but I've seen quite a few of the modern faux links, constructed from the ground up courses, and I think they are pretty conflicting.
Much of the criticism of WS, it seems to me, is coming from people who put a high value on golf courses being, or seeming to be, natural. If you value naturalness in a course, then arriving at a property through flatlands to find large, obviously artificial mounds greeting you, then however good the golf course itself, there will be, somewhere deep in your brain, the perception that it isn't 'real'. Few projects have enough land or cash (or ambition) to continue the shaping right to the edge of the property. At Sand GC in Sweden, a Hills/Forrest course I saw two years ago, there were some really interesting holes on the interior; but I couldn't get out of my mind the images we saw on arrival, huge mounds rising starkly from the flats. It was obviously imposed on the land, and that didn't help my view of the course. At the Castle course in St Andrews, which in general, I really like, when you get to the top of the property, you see the farmland that surrounds it, and again, it brings home to you the artificiality. One of the things that Mike Nuzzo did so well at Wolf Point was to blend the course into the surrounding land by toning down the shaping on the outside edges (for those who've been there, I'm thinking especially of the left side of the third hole), although the shaping at WP is on a much smaller scale anyway. Kingsbarns does the natural thing better than most, but the way the course is terraced into decks to ensure that every hole has a water view brings home the degree of unnaturalness that's there.
There is nothing wrong with artifice per se. But if you try to mimic nature, then you shouldn't be surprised if people comment on where you have and haven't succeeded in doing so.