"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence
they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.
Sometimes "they" are us who got an entire graduate degree for the explicit purpose of saying this stuff where academics might take it seriously.
