I agree that this is true, but at a certain point it seems like a justified reaction to unequal importance.

Other Gelman targets like the "himmicanes" paper generated a bit of media attention without any real consequence. Power poses, meanwhile, have become a major pop-science hit. They're still being widely read and promoted, even by tech conferences and news orgs like the BBC. And Cuddy in particular has chosen an aggressive non-scientific promotion campaign while her co-authors have made more honest attempts to take on the replication question - if Carvey was getting the same amount of flak I'd be more concerned that something unfair was happening.

If power poses don't work, it seems like a much worse indictment of academic social psych than most other failures to replicate - the results were widely touted and are still being raised to public acceptance even as they fall apart. The challenges to stereotype threat, priming, and the IAT are even scarier - those results have become well-established and even enshrined in law.

Throughout the replication crisis, my greatest frustration has been the inconsistent narrative coming from researchers. They're simultaneously demanding formal academic critiques instead of blogs, ignoring those critiques when they do exist, and then replying with the same sort of informal aggression they decried in the first place.

I think you're exactly right that Gelman's aggressive approach is motivated by the field's unwillingness to acknowledge anything milder. And seeing responses like Fiske, Cuddy, and Wansink have largely convinced me that there's a major double-standard at work between the level of seriousness applied when attacking critics and the level applied when presenting results as academic truth.