[timr]

> One of these premises is that their work properly models reality, there seems to be a lot of well informed doubt by subject-matter experts.

The model is fine. There's no more "well informed doubt" than for any other paper. You can certainly debate the details of what they did, but none of this debate is substantial enough to invalidate the work.

What you're seeing is a group of people who have largely pre-judged the outcome, inventing reasons to reject an experiment that disagrees with their prior conclusions. This always happens, in any scientific domain. Nonetheless, there are also a large number of well-informed people who see this as an interesting result. If you don't listen to both groups, you will be misled.