The issue is people have differing personal definitions of Dunning Kruger. The generally demonstrated effect in the sample of people Dunning and Kruger analyze

The issue is people have differing personal definitions of Dunning Kruger. The generally demonstrated effect in the sample of people Dunning and Kruger analyzed was "people tend to estimate the percentile of their own skill as closer to the average than it really is, with a slight bias towards an above-average mean. This leads to overestimation of relative ability by those in lower percentiles, and the opposite for those in higher percentiles" However when people cite Dunning Kruger in popular culture they mean "below average people think they're above average, and above average people assume they're below average", which was not shown in the original study, and wouldn't show up in an analysis attempting to justify it via a misunderstanding of autocorrelation. The general point in the rebuttal is correct. A completely noisy graph of people's estimations of their own ability would show a Dunning-Kruger resembling residual graph (x-y vs x). However, one wouldn't expect people in the 1st percentile to have an equal distribution of perceived skill as people in the 50th or 99th percentile. If that were true, it would be worth reporting.