I think you illustrated the issue with the argument very well. Saying "Weird people in the past were put to death" doesn't make sense because it's too broad both space and time wise. If you look at the article about the witch trial, the peak of the trials, where most of the executions were carried, was between 1560 to 1630, and was mainly in Germany and Scotland, while executions were few in Spain, Italy and France. It's an incredibly narrow band, and then there is the argument that the people convicted of witchcraft were just people deemed weird. While I'm sure that was the case for some of them, it was also a convenient way to appropriate the neighbor's land or get rid of political ennemies
>However there appears to be sufficient evidence that during times of severe economic hardship, standard societal protections falter. In those circumstances, anyone deemed a burden or an omen of bad luck was at risk.
I don't think there is sufficient evidence of that. First of all, being deemed a burden is very different than being weird and shouldn't be bundled together. Second, there has been a lot of periods of severe economic hardship in the past that didn't result in the execution of weird people. It seems like a loose legal system was more to blame than economic crisis. From the article you linked :
The witch trials that occurred there were symptomatic of a weak legal system and "witches were most likely to be tried and convicted in regions where magistrates departed from established legal statutes"
In other words, if you let a bunch of villagers to handle everything themselves with no repercussions they'll start doing stuff like that, but I see no evidence than "weirdness" was a factor in the article, and in the west that was pretty much solved by the 18th century when countries starting having a strong central structure