That’s fair! But I also think most op-eds on any topic are pretty bad. As for academic papers, I have to say it took me at least a year to write anything good about EA, and that was on a research-only postdoc with 50% of my research time devoted to longtermism.
There’s an awful lot that has been written on these topics, and catching up on the state of the art can’t be rushed without bad results.
I’d like to hope that academics are aiming for a level of understanding above that of a typical user on an Internet forum.
All academic works have a right to reply. Many journals print response papers and it is a live option to submit responses to critical papers, including mine. It is also common to respond to others in the context of a larger paper. The only limit to the right of academic reply is that the response must be of suitable quality and interest to satisfy expert reviewers.