I'd say you've hit the nail squarely on the head here.
As an (amusingly directly relevant to the side-discussion) example, in a college English course I took we had a group project and presentation in which we had to take a position on an issue. Despite it being dangerous territory, my group dove directly into the vaccine debate. After beginning our research (note that this was prior to the major cited paper(s) on the issue being retracted) we decided that we would work very carefully, within the guidelines of the project, to advocate that any and all possible links should be researched farther. Technically this position was not a great fit for the directions we had been given, but we wanted to be very careful to say "this might be an issue and should be investigated in more detail" rather than "this is a problem and we fix it with [x]."
TL;DR: Taking the hard line is often a bad call, but calling for something to be looked into (with cause) is often wise. If you read the newsgroup post to the end, this is exactly what the author does, albeit with some important context to the issue omitted.
As an (amusingly directly relevant to the side-discussion) example, in a college English course I took we had a group project and presentation in which we had to take a position on an issue. Despite it being dangerous territory, my group dove directly into the vaccine debate. After beginning our research (note that this was prior to the major cited paper(s) on the issue being retracted) we decided that we would work very carefully, within the guidelines of the project, to advocate that any and all possible links should be researched farther. Technically this position was not a great fit for the directions we had been given, but we wanted to be very careful to say "this might be an issue and should be investigated in more detail" rather than "this is a problem and we fix it with [x]."
TL;DR: Taking the hard line is often a bad call, but calling for something to be looked into (with cause) is often wise. If you read the newsgroup post to the end, this is exactly what the author does, albeit with some important context to the issue omitted.