The opinion piece went from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Breivik and white supremacy in five paragraphs. I reckon you need a special set of glasses to appreciate these kind of articles.
Well, yes. Just like one would need a special set of glasses to appreciate an article on threads vs coroutines. Historians write at other historians with the same short-cutting assumptions about loyalty to the author's position as software engineers writing at other software engineers. If we want to get the right understanding then we need to start with the right base frame of reference.
You are on "a level", historians are on a different level. Reality has many perspectives to it, and people have strong feelings about them.
My wife is a history professor. Her qualifying exams involved reading more than 250 academic books in various subfields related to hers. This is before she even really started her major research. History professors really do have just a completely different level of background than somebody who took a single course at university. Like, I would expect the typical history professor to have read something resembling 1000x the amount of academic work than somebody who took a single course.
So yeah, I'd expect a review written by a historian of a book written by a historian intended to be read by other historians will have wildly different context about the way that a subfield has evolved and been used or abused by various people over time.