Is he though? He publishes frequently in a bunch of journals that I've never heard of but an actual cryptography expert would know that it is the asymptotic beh

Is he though? He publishes frequently in a bunch of journals that I've never heard of but an actual cryptography expert would know that it is the asymptotic behaviour of an algorithm that matters. You could write exactly the same post even if the only algorithm you had for factorization was trial division. You just would need to tweak the totally arbitrary cutoff point.