I’m well aware of the concept - but the whole point of them is to suggest other perspectives to view a concept from to gain a different understanding of the issue at hand

What you did is just asking questions that were answered in the article, thinking “haha, I’ve got them!” Then you got defensive and pretended they were all rhetorical when everyone pointed out you’d know the answer if you just read the damn article.

For example, let’s imagine we’re discussing an article about a court fining someone for violating a gag order.

A good format for a rhetorical question might be “would the judge have given this sentence to him if he was …?”

Note how this isn’t something that would be covered in article, because it covers a theoretical scenario.

A bad rhetorical question might be “how much was the fine?” This is because you could just read the damn story.