The advice that first drafts are meant to be bad has done a lot of…

The advice that first drafts are meant to be bad has done a lot of damage and I want to complain about it properly.

It is meant kindly. It exists to stop people freezing. But taken literally it produces writers who aim low on purpose and then discover that a draft written badly on purpose is harder to fix, because you cannot tell which of its problems are the ones you put there deliberately.

The useful version: a first draft is allowed to be wrong. Wrong is different from bad. Write the best sentence you can and be prepared to learn it was the wrong sentence. That is a workable instruction. "Write badly" is not.