I just mentioned how it bothers me that people use so many cases from more than a century ago to justify these things today and you've given me links to those old examples.

The only modern example from your second link is a case where a doctor performed a very interesting experiment to demonstrate their thesis, it successfully changed the expert consensus, and he was awarded the highest possible prize from the academic community two decades later. Not exactly a "ivory tower academics conspire to hold knowledge back" situation. The sole thing that makes this story so interesting is that he conducted the experiment on himself.

The first link is asking for amateurs to work with academics. Again, extremely different than "academia holding back progress." Academia is explicitly supporting outsider ideas in this case!

The third link is five paragraphs long and again does not discuss anything remotely modern. There's whole books about the history of science! Even specifically about scientific revolutions! And they tend to be written, gasp, by academics (that's who writes the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy)!

Absolutely none of this is meaningful evidence that the academic community is behaving in an unacceptable way to Hancock.

Collecting evidence and changing theory in the face of new facts is doing science. Defending entrenched positions based on vested interest and appeal to authority is not.

You don't get to point to people doing the latter and saying it taints the work of people doing the former. It makes no sense.