I am more worried that, in the most famous newspaper in the most powerful country in the world, opinion pieces are overwhelmingly dominated by emotionally charged anecdotes while actual data plays only a cursory role.
2. Opinion pieces (should) mean they have a declared persuasive goal, not that all forms of rhetoric are acceptable. The word "opinion" is not a license to argue from astrology.
Maybe newspapers should do more collaborations where one author writes the emotion, and the other does research and gets the data. Then an editor blends the two into a uniform article. (It would be nice for one person to do it all, but they are different enough that different people would be good at them.)