Academia showed me that freshmen arrive green and wide eyed, but also filled with integrity and wondrous belief in science. Only after graduation, masters, doctorate and postdoc are they fully ground down into cynical, jaded, institutionalised husks. Before they have learned to play "institutional games" undergrads are the kids who see when the Emperor has no clothes.
https://sleepdiplomat.wordpress.com/
... where he first links to the takedown before addressing the issues.
It's an airport pop science book for goodness sake, it's not like fabricating results to get an article in Nature.
An article in Nature may be read by a few thousand people. An airport pop book will influence tens or hundreds of millions. Especially for health related subjects it's standard of truth ought to be a lot higher.
In any of these contexts, if you want to be rigorous, journalists typically won't even allow you to. Any nuanced take will be dismissed as "too long", "too complicated", "the public won't understand this, we need to simplify", "we cannot discuss this in so much detail because we need to engage the reader", "yes, I know this isn't 100% accurate but we need a catchy headline", etc. So when we go out of the scientific bubble, the standard of truth drops enormously.
Not sure how it works with pop books but I suppose there is some non-scientist editor telling you how to "reach" the public, so I wouldn't expect it to be too different.
But I believe that if one is a fairly good writer a lot of nuance can be cut without sacrificing substantial truth.
What I noticed during Covid19 was the public bypassing those "think-walls" and going straight to the source papers/data. When necessary, ordinary folks can digest raw stuff without having it mashed and the crusts cut off.
Of course citizen science-journalism created it's own problems when everyone became an armchair epidemiologist.
https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#appendix-is-why-we-sle...