It’s a fun article and interesting to muse over but I’m always skeptical of these kind of drive-by data analyses actually mean much.

1. Take a bunch of easily available data (which hasn’t been validated for completeness, accuracy, bias, etc)

2. Apply some easily available algorithmic analysis (that the author doesn’t have a deep understand of)

3. Put it in an easily available visualization (that has been chosen primarily to look nice)

4. Draw some conclusions and assert that is backed by data

They feel rigorous because “wow so much data” and novel because “you couldn’t do this before computers + internet” but there are so many ways to get it wrong and reach different conclusions if your data is bad or your algorithms are misapplied.