If the evidence is in the footnotes (and further reading) then doesn't that mean it's not useless cliches?
Nevertheless, my subjective feeling is still that potentially strong arguments are being watered down by weaker arguments. I believe I would have responded better had these been split into separate articles.
Also, it's good to understand the limitations of the scientific process.
That is, you can formulate some hypothesis, and the job of evidence is to move probability mass around. I.e. when you have hypotheses A, B and C, each piece of evidence towards A makes you more sure of A, and less sure of B and C.
Weak evidence towards A makes you weakly more sure of A, and weakly less sure of B and C. But it's still better than choosing based on a coin flip.