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"such as" and "like" are synonymous. Not sure what they're basing of in this case, but they've effectively replaced one "Word Cruft" (it isn't, it's grammatically normal) with another.
For the record, Word Cruft are "filler words" that can be safely removed entirely without affecting the sentence.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupRemoving "such as" in these examples would make them grammatically incorrect, or at best, extremely robotic and awkward to read.
Putting "like" in the slot works too if you are really really picky about 2 more letters though.
Edited by Tonwen "Grandmaster Combat, son!"Yeah, it seems to me from the Word Cruft page and the above responses that Word Cruft is for instances where you can, theoretically, fully delete the word or phrase from the entry with no replacement, without causing any grammar issues or reducing the amount of information conveyed. Cases where removing the word entirely with no replacement does cause these issues isn't Word Cruft.
That isn't to say there aren't instances where non-Word Cruft can still be an issue, like someone using borderline Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness in how they phrased something, but I wouldn't classify using "such as" instead of "like" as being remotely that serious.
Edited by Dirtyblue929

I just got a standard Word Cruft notifier from Random Troper 123 over an edit I made to YMMV.Just Cause 2. Checking the page history, this was their edit reason when correcting my alleged error:
The latter part is unrelated to any of my edits and doesn’t matter, but here’s the two sentences (only the latter of which was me, the other has been on the page for a while) that they considered “word cruft” in their usage of the phrase “such as”:
In both cases they replaced “such as” with “like”. Now if I’m wrong I’m wrong, and fully accept it, but I checked the Word Cruft page to be sure and got no impression that something as simple as starting a list of examples with the phrase “such as” counts as a violation. It seems like far too common of a way of speaking/writing and far too small of an “excess” of words; to my understanding Word Cruft is about adding completely unnecessary sentences or phrases that add no context to an example, like “we need to talk about X!” Or “isn’t that crazy?!”
Edited by Dirtyblue929