cringe inducing texts? are you serious? what does that mean?

cringe in the modern vernacular means "behavior, content, or situations that cause acute embarrassment, awkwardness, or secondhand embarrassment"

As a general rule most manifestos have a subtext of how the manifesto writers are brilliant people meant to get rid of the rubbish of the past and fix the current situation in whatever subject the manifesto is focused on. After the time of the text is gone and the manifesto is a piece of the past these manifestos may elicit either the feeling of how spot on they were, secondhand embarrassment, or just hilarity, sometimes even mixes of these feelings if your relation to the movement the manifesto champions is a complicated one.

Thus when Andre Breton writes his actual poetry I might like it, but when he starts writing about what Surrealism will achieve I start thinking "give it a rest, Breton" and looking away at Yeats as someone not quite as embarrassing.