COULD HAVE + past participle – English Grammar Profiler

In the English Grammar Profile, C1 point 179 in MODALITY is defined as:

 ‘could have’ + ‘-ed’ form to express disapproval or criticism.

True insights into usage are problematic, to say the least.  Who knows what the person using language truly was intending to do with it?  Disapproval or criticism vs speculation or regret is very hard to locate in corpora, it requires manual interpretation (something we can’t access easily)

B2 points 140, 142, 158, 176 in the category of MODALITY are used for PAST POSSIBILITY, SPECULATION, REGRET.

On the Left, iWeb corpus gives us the following past participles:

1 COULD HAVE BEEN 178902

On the right further collocations, 4 to the left and right are from COCA corpus:
1 WORSE (JJR ) 542

Seems like speculation.

2 AVOIDED (VVN ) 464

Sounds like criticism to me.

3 PREVENTED (VVN ) 357 4 KILLED (VVN ) 278

5 WISH (VV0 ) 227

7 SAVED (VVN ) 145 8 CAUSED (VVN ) 93 9 HANDLED (VVN ) 88

3 THING (NN1 ) 217 4 WITHOUT (IW ) 206 5 NOTHING (PN1 ) 203 6 THINGS (NN2 ) 200 7 JOB (NN1 ) 174 8 ANYTHING (PN1 ) 167 9 DIFFERENTLY (RR ) 159

4 COULD HAVE MADE 13903 5 COULD HAVE GONE 12542 6 COULD HAVE USED 11385 7 COULD HAVE GOTTEN 7978 8 COULD HAVE HAPPENED 7390

11 COULD HAVE COME 5235 12 COULD HAVE SAVED 5064 13 COULD HAVE CAUSED 4276 14 COULD HAVE SEEN 3691 15 COULD HAVE GIVEN 3464 16 COULD HAVE SAID 3415 17 COULD HAVE GOT 3403 18 COULD HAVE WON 3066 19 COULD HAVE WRITTEN 3016