In many fields publications in N are really used to occupy territories and fight for funds. But just in this case, direct competition and the fear of being overpowered by the people with maths & computers & money seem remote dangers. So something other may still play a role.
I had hoped someone comes and explains the epistemic outlook in the field as basically incompatible with the crude network model of events and links and its brutal simplifications which could hardly deliver anything noteworthy.
Instead, mostly came: quantitative historical science exists, but cannot be done like that, there are better data, and without the full context how dare these people to analyse historical data. Fair enough, unless the critique already fails at the simple apprehension, what is in the paper itself.
It's useful to note the reactions were more to the secondhand reporting of the paper, where the framing of 'solves a problem historians couldn't' comes into play, the irritation being as much that it ignores that the data was collected by historians & the tested hypothesis was theirs as well
The reaction is a more generalized one to the state of higher education, funding, attitudes towards history & the humanities, overstepping of boundaries & inadequate reporting than it is about this paper. There are some real & serious concerns there which color all cross discipline interactions.
Yeah, that sounds reasonable. If one sees all this horrible reporting on science in popular media where everything is mysteries, unsolved riddles, gripping sensations, framing science as spectacle, in that atmosphere it is hard to justify research with main activity careful reading & writing.