I agree that the author made an imperfect argument and probably should not make factual claims that aren't supported by data. I think people arguing in bad fait

I agree that the author made an imperfect argument and probably should not make factual claims that aren't supported by data. I think people arguing in bad faith tend to pick up on this kind of error because, like the commenter I responded to, they feel that their ability to refute anything about the argument means they've refuted the argument. My intent in responding was to point out that this is stupid, and that no one writing informally can really make an unassailable factual argument, which I did by doing the same kind of stupid nitpicking on their nitpick. Finding the weakest peripheral claim made in an argument is essentially always a fractal recursion into increasingly banal minutiae that serves no one except people like me who are trying to procrastinate on actual work by writing comments on a dumb aggregator website where devs argue for fun. I think we are in agreement at most of the self-similar layers of this