The number of references are not an indication of the quality of a work. Adam Smith wrote a whole book on The Theory of Moral Sentiments but in Debt, Graeber invents Adam Smith's morality whole cloth.

I have no intention of reading Dawn of Everything but reviewers have noticed references that say the opposite of what the authors claim they say.

I am aware that there are problems with the books, even some serious ones. But I find that hardly surprising from a book that references a 1000 other scholarly works. But the reason you can critique the book effectively is because he references where his claims originate from.

In the language of this essay [1], Graeber's work is legible, Harari's not at all.

[1] https://acesounderglass.com/2022/02/07/epistemic-legibility/

I find this interesting. I've read Graeber essays, but the only book I tried is "Utopia of Rules" and I found that it read as if he did exactly what you describe Harrari as doing.

It felt like he set up a windmill separate from reality to tilt at.

I do agree that Harari is great for thought piece stuff, I put him in the same category as Gladwell. Entertaining to read, but not to be trusted as a singular source.

Our models and explanations of the world are dependent on our belief system and the framework through which we look at. For example, a marxist's explanation of the economic system is very different from that of a neo-liberal. The two would not even agree on an ontology, yet alone the mechanism.

Graeber was a self-proclaimed anarachist. His books indeed have a different description of reality than the orthodox description of reality. If you don't agree with his description, then it will indeed look outlandish - the same way an atheist's and religious person's descriptions sound outlandish to each other. If you do agree with his descriptions, or at least that there are many different conceptions of the world, then his views are more reasonable.

Harari is not making scholarly arguments at all, so we cant even say much about his books.