It's not particularly nasty. The fact that they're doing both share buybacks and dividends is a little imperfect, but falls well short of evil.
In one sense, the two are similar. Some of the "value of the company" is returned to its owners. In the case of a dividend, it's obviously pretty even-handed, in the case of a buyback, it tends to be too, those whole sell into the buyback get paid off, those who don't effectively end up with their shares being worth proportionally more.
However, you generally want to do one, or the other, not both. Roughly speaking, if the stock is undervalued, you want to do a buyback, if the stock is overvalued, you want to issue a dividend. There's maybe a little adjustment you should do for this because of tax policy. Being unclear about which is better for investors is commonplace and, to be fair, often a compromise that reflects the fact that "overvalued" and "undervalued" are often debatable. So it's not "evil" or even "oh my god stupid", just a little bit meh, IMHO.