I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the enti

I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But still, a minimal test for whether you've actually obviated them would be whether you can double back and show how the new paradigm resolves/makes them look naive and confused. And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such school of thought as part of their exposition.