It's certainly true that I've read more of Chomsky himself than the immense literature he spawned; and most of my reading of the generativist literature is at its messy edges where those explanations tend to be pretty unconvincing. Focus your reading on dubious generative accounts of morphologically-rich languages and it's easy to become disillusioned with the paradigm. "Principles and parameters" is where he lost me, but Chomsky himself has retreated from so many positions over the decades, when theory meets evidence, that it's hard to tell in a coherent way what his theoretical framework actually is anymore.

I'm not really "replacing 50 years of work" so much as speaking from a different paradigm. Linguistics is a discipline of multiple competing paradigms, and suffers the resulting problem of people talking past each other because they do not share the same premises or assumptions about the field of study. It's not my fault that Chomsky led a generation of linguists down so many blind alleys for decades. But I don't know how many people would defend something like "The Sound Pattern of English" over say, optimality theory.

I don't even agree that there are many linguistic "universals". Most so-called "universals" are rather implicational tendencies, which do not require appeals to native grammatical knowledge to explain. You don't need a "head branching parameter" to explain many head directionality tendencies, just the general human tendency to pay more attention to elements at the edges of statements and the process of diachronic systematization. True linguistic universals are very few, and frequently seem to me to be more general cognitive universals in linguistic disguise. https://www.princeton.edu/~adele/LIN_106:_UCB_files/Evans-Le...

Generative grammar itself does not attempt to explain the psychological reality of how living humans parse and process novel sentences, but rather to describe an abstract system of knowledge of a WEIRD and mono-lectual standard language known by ideal speaker-hearers (who lack such prosaic things as "memory limitations"). Idealizing language is one thing, but this idealization seems quite different from language as the semiotic practices, social conventions, and shared cognitive tools used for communication by multi-lectual human animals as a core element of their social behavior.