I think it's a mistake to think that the only people with useful opinions are experts in the field. While still leaving much to be desired, Science education has gotten much better in the last 50-60 years and i find I've been pleasantly surprised how discerning the public is about bad science recently.
The thing about this experiment is that it really is accessible. It's something most people could imagine themselves doing and the observable is fairly clear we with like a few minor caveats with simple things to try that even refute those! People are resonating with that.
Let them for gods sake.
Plus the elegant simplicity should give the result and the amateur replications more credence and yet we have these weird kneejerk reactions against them by scientists who act seemingly threatened, I wonder if that is just insecurity about their own corpus. Any scientist who won't admit to having some stinker data that they pushed through is probably lying or has like, one publication. And many have a career that is all stinkers.
Publicly. But they are saying stuff and it isn't all negative but very, very carefully hedged and qualified.