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The issue has nothing to do with creative fiction. Nobody is bothered by stories that might use real life as a basis of inspiration.

The issue is that these stories are latched onto as 'narrative basis' for some kind of populist ideal, which may frankly just be bigotry.

The story was not picked up upon because it was just 'great writing' - it created buzz because it engendered a kind of bigoted fantasy among those that wanted to buy into the potential truthiness of it all.

Like the 'Man Next Door Who Raped The White Girl' (i.e. Black man) from the 'Reader's Digest', 1952 etc.

It's an issue because people can do whatever they want under the guise of creative fiction, and then try to use it as some kind of scare mongering re: 'This could happen! This is happening!'

I'm Canadian, we had to read the Handmaid's Tale in school. Margaret Atwood is famous for saying 'all these things happened somewhere in history' - essentially she cherry picked the absolute worst bits of history and rolled them into a hyper-fascist theocracy. Which is 100% legitimate and interesting from a creative perspective ... but the TV series became a ridiculous point of reference for the fantastical ignorance of some populists who loved think of this as the interpretation of their political enemies. As a TV series it's great fun. But when it's used beyond that (or more poignantly, used by the studios to play into people's bigotry) then it's not good.

Edit: please see my above comment for reference as to how most of the media picked up on this piece as the basis for a narrative. It's not some corner case conspiracy - it was used by NPR, RollingStone, Wapo, Medium, The Guardian etc. etc..