I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?
There's a difference between "papers" and "every other paper". Instead of a consensus, economists are split into camps over the question whether austerity harms or improves economic growth. There's been criticism of austerity even from the IMF, for instance. Discrediting Reinhart and Rogoff's paper (published without peer-review, by the way) in particular is important because they were the first to collect and analyse data from so many sources and their results couldn't be replicated and are now shown to be incorrect.