I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level experience.
There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one particular question. But he:
- did not use the standard/expected approach to this problem
- did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to find him any partial credit (this is not easy!)
- had a pile of impenetrable unnecessary very complex alien math that I wasn't going to try to cut through given that
- his final answer was very, very wrong
- in fact, it was wrong by 26 orders of magnitude
- and he didn't have the skill to notice something was wrong (and, yes, I was lenient with students who noticed final answers were weird even if they couldn't/didn't fix it up)
- also, he was a major asshole (no surprise given that he's complaining about this "indignity") who was
- somehow still causing #MeToo problems in the 21st century despite being under 30 (seriously??)
So if that's who gets held up as "authorities", even minor ones, forgive me if I don't listen too much. I'll choose who I trust.
It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was one.