Agreed wholeheartedly! This is such a lazy, surface level view of Malcolm. Malcolm drops straight bars of poetic language throughout. And the way he learns to process grief as a man with emotional competency is such an interesting bit. After telling Macduff to dispute the grief of losing is whole family “like a man”, Macduff counters with how he will “feel it like a man” with his whole being, fully, genuinely. You can see how Malcolm takes this lesson and learns from it when Siward’s son (his cousin) is discovered to have been killed by Macbeth in Act V Scene VIII: “He’s worth more sorrow, and that I’ll spend for him.” They ought to hire better analytic writers for this site..

BTW, Malcolm is reported to have been in the thick of the fighting early and later tells Macduff, who does not scoff, that he would defeat Macbeth in single combat, a task which he delegates to Macduff.

The test of Macduff is thus a test of Malcolm, to establish his credentials as an improvement as a successor of his father.