For context:
Women footballers have only been paid at all for about a decade and a half, and of the small number of professional players in England, the majority only get a living wage. The best paid women's footballers in England - a tiny handful - earn £200,00 to £500,000 per annum
Any woman over the age of about 18 started playing when there was no expectation of even making a living playing football unless they went to America. Some of them had to pretend to be boys to get a club place. They put up with wall-to-wall misogynistic abuse, sneering, discouragement and even had to get around people actively trying to stop them playing.
All this came on top of the usual challenges which male footballers face trying to succeed.
There are still 10 men's clubs for every women's club. Girls (and their families) have to make more effort just to be able to play. By and large women players who have made it into the professional and semiprofessional league are exceptionally resilient and resourceful people who have overcome additional obstacles for the sheer love of the game and they deserve respect for that reason alone.
Criticism is valid. But abusing a player personally, in print, on their Instagram, isn't expressing criticism, is it?
[ETA: And quite honestly some of the criticism is just misogyny because how dare women even think they can play a man's game?]
Being abused for missing a penalty, being called a numpty, or a shit footballer, or even a traitor or whatever is one thing. Being racially abused or abused for what you look like is something else. People experience abuse of their group as worse than personal abuse. Just think how angry people get about what they see as "anti-British".
Women are socialised to care about what others think of them, to care about their looks and invest their sense of worth at least partly in that. SM abuse affects them more badly. I wish it wasn't like that, but...
So yes, while I agree that staying off SM would be wise, you can't just shrug and say it's just the same for every football player because it really isn't.
More objectivity from pundits and commentators would be very welcome, but their instinct is to support their friends and erstwhile teammates who are coming under fire. They themselves also desperately want women's football to grow and succeed, so they gloss over failings. It's human nature. More dispassionate assessment is overdue but ironically is less likely to happen in the current atmosphere.