I am critical of many decisions of the standard, however I disagree that it has held it back. The effort to standardise has been useful and it benefits Forth that there is now a common language for e.g. new learners to start with, before trying out more exotic Forths. Furthermore, the language the standard defines is essentially as useful (or more useful than) many of the idiomatic Forths out there, all inspired by Chuck Moore's earlier Forth.
Chuck Moore's later Forths were attempts to further simplify Forth and take alternative approaches that simply aren't as useful or applicable to the core of Forth programmers, but that Chuck enjoys. He's often said that he makes his Forths for himself and not anyone else, e.g. why he would write a color-based Forth when some people are color-blind. There have been some more applicable and less applicable factorisations, and I see his continuing influence around in different Forths; some standard, some not.
In my opinion, both of you are right. The issue with the standard is not if it is a good or a bad standard; the whole concept of standardization goes against Chuck's approach of writing your own Forth fitted to the problem at hand. However, I think there is no discussion in that the industry preferred a standard to this unlimited freedom, so ANSI-FORTH really helped Forth in industrial settings.
In other words: the standard held back the concept of Forth by Chuck Moore, but it helped to push forward the concept of Forth as an industrial product. A very grey area...
I think the problem is that people going the standardization route were trying to build abstractions. Unfortunately most abstractions built in forth tended to feel rather cumbersome and ineffective to me.
What Chuck Moore mostly did was focus on simplifying the problem such that he can avoid as much abstraction as possible. Which isn't a very accessible way of development perhaps.
I'm not sure if there's a good middle ground between these two approaches..
Chuck Moore's later Forths were attempts to further simplify Forth and take alternative approaches that simply aren't as useful or applicable to the core of Forth programmers, but that Chuck enjoys. He's often said that he makes his Forths for himself and not anyone else, e.g. why he would write a color-based Forth when some people are color-blind. There have been some more applicable and less applicable factorisations, and I see his continuing influence around in different Forths; some standard, some not.