Many elements can be responsive by just letting things float in them. Their width can be governed by their content and outer constraints. One can then define minimum widths for things. This way most of the responsiveness becomes simple and there is usually no need for media queries reacting to a specific width of arbitrarily chosen 1200px or similar. Elements float to the next line, when they don't have enough space any longer.

I understand this as criticism against designs, that are "responsive" in a way, that they simply "snap" at a specific width into a full blown "mobile" looking view, instead of seamlessly adapting to available width.

Having two completely unrelated UIs – one for mobile, one for desktop - isn't really responsive. When done that way there's some point (e.g. 1199px width in the OP's example) where you suddenly have a tiny mobile web site with a ton of blank space on either side (or worse, it stretches it all out to fit and all the blank space is within every single button and widget).

There should either be several progressively more "mobile" breakpoints, or even better, use component queries so individual chunks of the page can rearrange their contents as their available area shrinks.