Not because they are liked but because they are the only option outside of maybe starlink.
people get duped by deceptive marketing every day, man.
I think the assumption behind their statement is that this in fact the case.
Media/politics use the words credentials and expertise interchangeably, and credentials invariably means those issued by universities. So a professor is assumed to always be an expert, even if they can't evidence that in reality. The result is a large number of ivory tower academics who call themselves experts in things, but who have no skin in the game and whose theories are never tested against reality. Hence the replication crisis, which Marc Andreessen is on the record as being very concerned/aware about.
Determining actual expertise is the Number 1 problem faced by both VCs and startup founders, and those are both communities who are famously rather indifferent to credentials.
I'm actually a fan of the overall idea of techno optimism. But it's hard to get behind a version that starts out with the premise that we should exclude experts who've spent their lifetime focused on getting really good at knowing WTF they are talking about presumably in favor of billionaire VCs who can speak to the "real world". Don't get me wrong, if we're going to become a galaxy spanning civilization or whatever, we'll certainly need large and regular doses of reality. But we'll also need a lot of credentialed expertise.