“1. Your understanding of what a Tzadik is, as is stated in the Tanya is not a belief shared by any other contemporary frum Jews. This includes other Chasidim. I saw a few posters makes statements to the effect that other Chasidim have a more extreme view of the nature of a Tzadik. This is false. Maybe it was true in the past, but it certainly isn’t now (personally I think this was never the case).”
I encountered something along these lines when I was in eighth grade. I was a counselor together with anther girl who was the granddaughter of a Rebbe in EY. She was boasting to me how her grandfather the Rebbe had a fancy car and house.
To me that sounded very foreign and not like “Rebbe” material so I asked her puzzled, “why would a review care about a fancy house and car?”
She answred “everyone has a different yetzer hara. Some like kovod, others like fancy stuff.”
Now I was even more confused. “Wait isn’t the Rebbe a tzadik who doesn’t have a yetzer hara?”
She answred “it used to be like that, but now there’s been yeridas Hadoros…”
At that point I understood that when I say tzadik or Rebbe, and someone else does, were not speaking the same language.
But other chassidim get the concept, because before the holocaust they also had their fair share of tzaddikim like the Tanya.
In the litvishe world, I’ve heard that the Rebbe said R Yisrael Salanter was a tzadik of the Tanya.