Media Criticism

Sure, let's do some media criticism.

1. The whole thing with the unicorn lair was based on North Korea releasing an English-language press release saying they'd confirmed finding the lair of a unicorn ridden by King Tongmyong. That's it. That's what it said. Western sources picked up on it and thought it was funny, because it is, although for the most part they later clarified after figuring out exactly what was going on with North Korea's poor translation. Which they were able to do in pretty short order because they live in an open ecosystem where people can point out or criticize things that are wrong in media or primary sources.
2. Nobody is manipulating images of North Korea to make it look dark. The whole excerpt taking a bunch of image processing and compositing that everybody does to all satellite images, and making it sound like something sinister, is actually a textbook propaganda technique, also applied when people talk about inflation metrics in the US for example. Here's an unmodified photo taken by an astronaut that includes both Koreas.
3. The Korean War was fought by this generation's father's father's fathers. Plenty of nations (USSR, Vietnam, Germany) experienced cataclysmic destruction in war and then were able to heal and recover over time. If North Korea is still stunted because of the war, that's on them.
4. I have no idea about Juche so I won't comment.
5. As far as I can tell, the whole thesis of the book she cites here is that after in the 1990s they hit #1 in the world for child malnutrition during a famine in which almost a million North Koreans starved to death, North Koreans started "marketization" (as I understand it, in practice, the vast majority of them survive by being active to some extent on a tolerated black market, because there is no alternative). So if them not being last in the world for child malnutrition currently is being held up as a point of context that people need to keep in mind when criticizing the Korean system, I think the fact that they're only alive because they dodge around the Korean system is also relevant context.