It would genuinely shock me if Chomsky wasn't the most cited author for works published today even if you exclude works that are dismissive of him. The reason

It would genuinely shock me if Chomsky wasn't the most cited author for works published today even if you exclude works that are dismissive of him. The reason the specifics of Chomsky's proposals are changing is that it isn't a solved problem and he and others are continuing to try to advance the understanding by revising proposals in light of better arguments, simpler explanation and (contrary to what you say, see [1] which lists some examples) experimental evidence. In Chomsky's most recent book he himself quotes Wheeler: "Surely someday, we can believe, we will grasp the central idea of it all as so simple, so beautiful, so compelling that we will all say to each other, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind so long!’". I think people have a hard time understanding this because it is one of the few nascent sciences and therefore no one has figured out the fundamental theories. And if some specific proposal like X-bar theory is falsified or supplanted by something else that doesn't falsify the core ideas of universal grammar or the minimalist program. You say that it isn't possible to provide evidence that these are false but Moro for example conducted experiments comparing hierarchical and linear language processing that potentially would have provided reasonable evidence against language being hierarchical had they shown linear languages were processed similarly (instead they support it). The reason you should be downvoted is that you made a bunch of evidence free assertions; You could have said "Neil Bohr's work has been completely falsified and is of dubious value" with the same amount of supporting argument. [1] https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007363 https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007363