"""feeding into the narrative that science is just another competitive team sport where people compete with whatever means necessary is downright dangerous."""

This is precisely what modern science is (well, a major subset). The competition for grant funding and attention space is extremely intense.

I agree there was no "alzheimer's cabal" but it's not uncommon in science for the prevailing mainstream position to (intentionally or otherwise) suppress alternative opinions ("extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence" is often used to maintain the status quo).

One of the important issues is when an idea ends up dominating funding. If you have a legitimate alternative hypothesis but can't get the funding to run the experiments to provide that extraordinary evidence, you'll fail to convince people. The people who get the most funding are the ones who are the most competitive, not the smartest, or the rightest.