Since the very earliest days of Big Bang cosmology there has been a debate over the initial singularity, because nobody likes singularities. There was a debat

Since the very earliest days of Big Bang cosmology there has been a debate over the initial singularity, because nobody likes singularities. There was a debate about black holes for the same reason. The original Thorne-Hawking bet (scroll down past the more recent one on black hole information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%93Preskill_bet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%9...) was driven in part by discomfort with singularities. There was and is a feeling that something ought to make them go away, but we remain unsure if they really will, and until we have a genuine theory of quantum gravity our accounts of what happens at very high densities is going to be a bit hand-wavy. So this article's suggestion that the current situation is particularly new or different isn't all that accurate. There have always been two senses of the meaning of "the Big Bang" and the degree of comfort people have had with singularities has varied over time (lower in the '60's and '70's, higher in the '80's and '90's, lower again today.) Nor is it accurate to say that inflationary cosmology is completely uncontroversial and so well understood that we have no choice but to discard the initial singularity. Inflationary cosmologies are popular for good reasons, but they are not the only game in town--we recently saw a thing on Bohmian mechanics go by on HN that suggested an alternative to inflation, for example (I'm far from sold on the work, but use it simply as a way of pointing out that alternatives to inflation exist and can't quite be discarded completely just yet.)