The problem is that there are both some inaccuracies with the takedown, the book is still factually inaccurate in dangerous ways even though it is accurate in others, and ultimately neither source gives a satisfactory conclusion to the question of how you should approach sleep issues.

There is something about the Why We Sleep controversy that is uniquely frustrating to me, having dealt with sleep problems for years. If I hadn't read HN then I probably would have read that book for far longer than I did. What about the people that might not read HN and still aren't aware of the tangible harms it can cause? It currently has a 4.4 out of 5 on Goodreads and pages of written five-star reviews, proving the utter uselessness of such a metric for topics like health.

It seems the solution is research from a variety of different sources. That worked pretty well for actually sorting out my sleep issues, because I was more careful. But the thing is, time is finite. In the programming realm we can't always do the same militant validation for the thousands of microdependencies a single npm project can pull in. The amount of available information is exploding, and much of it is becoming obsoleted constantly. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. And when we decide to trust the creator as being an "expert" as a compromise, we will inevitably encounter sources like these.