I disagree with some of the later points the author brings up - the sentiment of "SEO is ruining searching for things" is certainly agreeable, but I find the connection to academia a bit more specious and extreme.

> Today it would be effectively impossible for a physicist to personally know all the other top physicists. In the U.S., the number of physics PhDs awarded per year grew from under 20 in 1900, to nearly 2,000 by 2018. Imagine trying to get all the leading theorists together for a group photo today.

What is the point here? It is a fact that knowledge expands and grows. If you collect all of the "top physicists", by some magical metric, you get physicists from vastly different subfields who probably wouldn't understand each others research. This is a good thing! We understand so much more about physics that you have entire sub-sub-fields warranting the same attention as quantum mechanics did at its beginnings.

> A doctorate just means much less, now, than it did. The fraction of physicists who can generate genuine new knowledge and insight is fairly small. Most of today’s physicists would not measure up to the standards that the field held for itself when that photo was taken in 1927.

This is... frustrating. Of course if you compare to the mythologized greats of physics you won't be as good. That doesn't mean what you are working on isn't new, or interesting, or important. The author seems to want every PhD to discover quantum mechanics. But that's already been done. Also, I would pushback on the author having the ability to judge whether a physicist is able to generate new knowledge.

> The dilution of the top experts doesn’t only mean that it’s harder for you and me and the New York Times to tell the first-rate researchers apart from the sea of mediocrities.

Work from physicists from the early to mid 1900s is of course going to seen to be on average better than the average work in physics today - we aren't going to still be looking at the stuff that was below average/didn't work out! There is an inherent survivorship bias in what ideas survive 100 years, but that doesn't mean that all ideas from that time were of equal importance. Also, if you are looking at the probably greatest period of advancement in physics, as the author seems to be, given their prior focus on physics, of course modern day stuff is going to pale in comparison. But of course if you compare to the 99th percentile everything else seems lesser.

> It’s also harder for those on the cutting edge to find each other.

This is just untrue - the people working in these areas know which journals/conferences are higher quality and which are worse, and are in direct communication with their colleagues. As an outsider attempting to peer in, yes, you won't have this knowledge. But the conclusion from that isn't that the experts also struggle with this, the conclusion is the hidden knowledge should be made more open.

> When an important new theory is published, instead of being circulated and torn apart by the two dozen people whose opinions matter, it’s sent off to some nameless apparatchik for the hollow bureaucratic ritual of peer review, so that the reviewer can demand bogus citations for himself and his friends.

I don't see where the author is going on this - the "circulated and torn apart" step still happens, though perhaps less violently. Academics do not see a peer reviewed article and assume "this is a good article, I will accept it at face value", they read over it, they might discuss it with colleagues, the authors presents at conferences, etc. Peer review is not the end of the process, its just a gatekeep to prevent the lowest quality from making it through. Yes, there are problems with the process, but certainly not enough to warrant the disdain the author shows. Furthermore, preprints are a common feature of some fields. If your theory is truly groundbreaking, post it to the arXiv, and it will eventually make its way around. Perelman's work is only on the arXiv, for instance.

I hope my points make some degree of sense.