Weeeell, yes and no. A lot of literary criticism is bogus and a lot comes down to personal taste, but I don't think we need to throw out the whole book on literary techniques. It might help to analyse these things in a little more detail.

I wouldn't actually call that Twilight opener a bad sentence. You're right, it is very similar to the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I think they're both good. I've never read Twilight, but you have to hesitate before taking a swipe at something so popular. The plot or the characterisation or whatever may be nonsense, but clearly Meyer has to be doing something right, and from this example at least it looks like she can string a sentence together. In a similar vein no-one is going to call Harry Potter especially deep (and a lot of literary critics did thumb their noses at it), but Rowling knows how to tell a story.

I'd contest the comparison of The Da Vinci Code and Ulysses, though. I've never read The Da Vinci Code and I hate Joyce, so I'm only going to talk about the sentences you've given as examples. You're right in that both quotes are attempting to accomplish the same thing, but I think I can make a fair case for why that Joyce quote is better than the Brown quote. The Brown quote is demonstrably bad writing — "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière" is extremely clumsy exposition. The whole sentence is a bit of an info-dump that doesn't give us much to engage with on a personal level — it's just a catalogue of job titles and locations. On the other hand the Joyce quote is much more personal. It describes Mulligan as if we're seeing him ourselves. We know what he looks like, we know where he's standing, and because we know what he's carrying we also know what he was doing when he was interrupted. It's subtler, it's better constructed, and it's more engaging because it is more relatable on a personal level.