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Early in the article, we get a discussion of the precession of Mercury, known for centuries. Then:

> (In this context, Newtonian mechanics gives such a good approximation of reality that these models don’t need to consider the effects of general relativity.)

But wasn't the precession of Mercury already known to be inadequately explained by Newtonian gravity, even before Einstein?

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The precession of mercury has a few contributions. The largest is the tug of planets (500 arc seconds/century), the next largest is from general relativity (50 arc seconds /century). There are other, smaller contributions stemming from the sun being oblate. Knowledge about the anomaly in the precession was partly what motivated Einstein, and was one of the early predictions of the theory.

Known by whom?

Astronomers...

Those guys used to believe in geocentric. Their claims were too easy to disbelief.

Am I deserve those downvotes? I consider that my answer is too cocky but the question is definitely about the scientific consensus and I did my best to imagine what the consensus could be like at that time, considering the so hard to believe conception about non-linearism in speed. For me, the conception of relativism was the hardest to believe among all science fields I stepped in.

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