I’ve not followed this story at all, and have no idea what is true or not, but generally when people use a boatload of adjectives which serve no purpose but to skew opinion, I assume they are not being honest. Using certain words to describe a situation does not make the situation what the author is saying, and if it is as they say, then the actual content should speak for itself.

For instance:

> Much of this unfounded skepticism is driven by a deeply flawed non-peer-reviewed publication by Cheng et al. that claimed to replicate our approach but failed to follow our methodology in major ways. In particular the authors did no pre-training (despite pre-training being mentioned 37 times in our Nature article),

This could easily be written more succinctly, and with less bias, as:

> Much of this skepticism is driven by a publication by Cheng et al. that claimed to replicate our approach but failed to follow our methodology in major ways. In particular the authors did no pre-training,

Calling the skepticism unfounded or deeply flawed does not make it so, and pointing out that a particular publication is not peer reviewed does not make its contents false. The authors would be better served by maintaining a more neutral tone rather than coming off accusatory and heavily biased.