Most of the 50 citations are preprint servers (like arXiv) or aggregators (like researchgate). It would be nice to count the number of citations in research papers in peer review journals.

> you will never be made aware of the disputes surrounding the research

ArXiv is not peer review, so it's as confiable as Wordpress or Medium or Blogspot or X/Tweeter or ... The main difference is that the post is in PDF instead of HTML. There is an invitation system to avoid very stupid cases, but it's very week.

I remember a weird cryptography "breakthrough", and they published it in arXiv, and the first 5 pages were an explanation of the rule of 9 for divisibility and then a dubious fast factorization algorithm. [The preprint was linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666501 and I replied to it (s/module/modulo/g)]