Wow, I have a couple Bill Bryson books on my reading list, can you share some examples of that?
"[...] I - someone who’s far from an expert at linguistics [...]"
The rather sniffy observation about Wikipedia falls very flat as the book was written 10 years before Wikipedia existed!
In fact Bryson wrote his book a good 20 years earlier than this critique so perhaps this huffy person has resources to draw upon that were not available in 1990.
Not that I really expect Bryson's stuff to dot every i and cross every t - he's a humourist.
Because you have access to various dictionaries and can easily verify it for yourself?
Assuming the quotes from the book are accurate, that's really poor.