There are a great number of opinions expressed on this site. I generally think "cronies" is pejorative and you generally think "cronies" is pejorative, but I take it on faith that there is at least one person out there thinking "hunh... cronies? yeah. That sounds good. I don't know why people get so upset when I say that."

And I do not know whether the person using it in a sentence is using it pejoratively. And heck, there are PLENTY of heresies I subscribe to: testing software is more often useful than it isn't, the web was done by amateurs, adding comments to code documenting the programmers' intent is useful, the rust borrow checker should have just been an add-on tool for C++, etc. So it may be ME who is against the grain on this one.

Which is to say... just be careful out there when you assume things about a large audience.