I agree with this. I also may be partly responsible for the use of the term - it’s used in the title of the “Most Active Lurkers” pre-installed Data Explorer query. The query is useful for identifying a trend, but its title and description make an unnecessary value judgement.
There are cases where lurking (reading) may be considered the appropriate behavior. For example, many questions have been asked and answered multiple times. Because I enjoy the interaction, I tend to give these questions full answers, but another type of response is something like “Have you tried searching for that?” This could leave a person feeling that they should have remained a lurker. On Meta I do see the community being especially welcoming for posts with the “first time” and “returning user” welcome notices though.
Another case is creating posts that could be seen to add no value to the conversation. I’m risking creating one of those here 
When I was working for Discourse I loved the icebreaker topics on our internal forum. They gave me a chance to say “I am here!” at times when I didn’t have much to contribute to the more technical conversations. I wonder if more icebreaker types of topics could be created on Meta? If so, would having those topics in a category that excluded anonymous users (and indexing by search engines) lower the barrier to posting and increase the likelihood that readers of the forum would register accounts?