There has been plenty.

I tried my first multi-day water only fast around 2005 after reading about it in a book written by an M.D. who used fasting to treat various illnesses. I can't remember the name though.

The article has some shocking statistics but most shocking to me was that the youngest person in the study was 20 years old, type 2 diabetic at 20.

I think the reason that drugs are the usual solution is simply that it is really really hard to get people to change their diets and/or fast.

That's the surprising thing. How can weight-loss and diet improvements to treat type II diabetes be some kind of revelation? Would diet approaches not have shown this correlation many decades ago?

There definitely was. I remember telling this to my college roommate few years ago after he gradually gained lot of weight and was diagnosed as pre-diabetic.