The industries (merchants of doubt) are so active, it's absolutely nontrivial for a well meaning layman not wanting to invest oddles of time to get to good conclusions.
The smoking point is not a problem, the nasty stuff start appearing as couple dozen degrees _above_ the smoking point, so you can use that as an early warning system.
It also contains antioxidants, which bind some of the nasty stuff for a while, so it really is better for you for regular cooking.
Could not disagree more. Olive oil will be spewing smoke and changing flavour well before you get to a sensible temperature for shallow or stir frying. It is very tasty and apparently quite good for you, so it's a great choice for low-temperature cooking, but anywhere smoking point is important, olive oil is not what you're looking for.
This is unfortunately just how the world is. Epistemology is hard, and there are a ton of people out there who make it harder (Three guesses as to whether the author of this article, or any other crappy prestige-publication journalist, thinks they're lying).
It's a scary and confusing world! At some level you just have to internalize that, build the most accurate model that's worth the overhead, and accept that you'll be wrong a lot.