It’s kind of sad how almost none of the replies to your comment are even related to anything you said. It’s almost strange to read. All of them except one or two seem to just be people who had their own message they wanted to say and replied to you because your comment is close to the top.

The only exception is the commenter who implied you were an out of touch ivory-tower academic because you called the pandemic benefits overgenerous. It’s the only reply whose author seems to have actually read your comment and it doesn’t even make an argument, only calls you names.

To answer your question as to why the top comment was someone just bullying economists based on a misinterpretation of the headline, the reason is because the left was never inherently more pro-science than the right. For a long time, the right denied climate change and the left embraced it because the right was representing coal miners who felt like their jobs were at risk and the left was representing environmentalists who appreciated having a rock-solid justification for why we needed to switch to forms of energy production that emit less carbon (which usually means they pollute less). This got converted in the cultural conciseness to the left “following the science” and the right distrusting it and thinking they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than people whose job it is to study the topic at hand. But that want why, it was just because the obvious prescription coming from science was bad for the population the right represented and good for the population the left represented. (If you still feel the reason the left supported climate change is because they believe what scientists tell them, why does the left broadly oppose nuclear?)

Now, the cultural battleground is moving from climate change and social issues like gay marriage where the science is either neutral or on the side of the left, to economic issues where it’s not so clear cut. For example, there’s wide agreement among economists that the corporate tax is one of the most distortionary and least efficient taxes, and should ideally be reduced to very low rates if not zero. Yet this is broadly ignored on the left, who want to instead make “corporations pay their fair share”, as of whatever you intuitively feel is a corporation’s fair share is the economically optimal corporate tax rate.

Economists are also not united in supporting a federal $15 minimum wage. (Actually if I remember correctly the majority opposite it.) If the left was truly pro-science, they’d ask economists what they thought the minimum wage should be, possibly fund studies to help determine the socially optimal amount, then implement whatever number they say. But that’s not how the number was chosen and now since there’s disagreement among economists about whether it’s a good idea, the left needs to justify why they suddenly know better than the people whose job it is to study this stuff, and that manifests as calling all economists stupid or in the pocket of big business whenever the topic comes up.

Obviously this post wasn’t about minimum wage, but what I’m trying to communicate is that economists are now seen by the left (mostly the young online left) as agents of the enemy, and many see it as their prerogative to make sure nobody has a good impression of them. In their circles everyone knows that, while you should follow the science, these economists either don’t really know what they’re talking about or are being actively deceptive and so their opinions can be safely disregarded. How else can you explain why the GP comment felt the need to call economists stupid before even reading the article to figure out what they had to say?