there's also some privilege involved in being able to take such a polemical approach to your own field, when in fact what he's doing does have many continuities with past scholarship

Yeahhhhh he got his tenured position at Princeton by doing some of the most conventional Roman history one could imagine, and then turned to revolutionizing the discipline. And it's really good that he went in that direction, but there's not so much acknowledgment that there are a lot more professional risks for younger scholars (because we don't have that renown and stability yet, and because the job market is going to be a lot worse for us) who want to be part of this kind of work.