Sure it's harsh. The question is how far you want to go down the ladder keeping spots in the team for your bunch of beloved try-hards? You might disagree with an individual decision to keep or jettison a particular player but the system is based on player turnover. This isn't a country town footy club where the butcher played full forwards until he was 45 and got too fat to run.
The fact is that supporters are rusted-on and think about football in tribal and heroic mythologies. On the other hand, the guys who actually comprise the clubs and do the work, the players, coaches, selectors, football managers, etc, operate in an extremely competitive environment where scraping together a bigger set of marginal advantages over the opposition wins the day.
There's a basic clash of values there, is't there? We demand the club wins, then criticise them when they win dirty. (And want their nuts if they lose dirty. Which is even weirder since losses = wins.)