I agree with you, and I think it is telling of how warped this debate is by normative viewpoints that such a high percentage of reference sources and arguments come from one highly independent and active source (gwern). Aside from the detail of the argument, if you're observing a debate as an outsider, and you're interested in how the world actually is, it is often useful to kind of subtract an estimate of how people would like the world to be from the consensus.