Why do you say that minimalism is wrong as a theory? Genuinely curious
OK, so to be perfectly honest this is mostly in jest - Minimalists have a bit of a reputation within linguistics for treating the assumptions of their framework as Universal Truths(TM) which understandably grates with linguists who reject those assumptions, resulting in what might be called a friendly rivalry.
There is not, to my knowledge, any piece of evidence that categorically disproves the core assumptions of Minimalist - but that is, in part, because Minimalism in its current form is unfalsifiable.
Consider flat syntactic structures, for example - say the post-auxiliary field in Warlpiri or Jiwarli, or even the Mittelfeld of a German sentence. You can interpret these through a framework that posits a universal hierarchical structure in language, but only by positing some kind of post-construction "scrambling", which makes the original hierarchical claims unfalsifiable. (If it's always possible that speakers can just move components around post-construction, then there is no longer any requirement for the surface form to reflect the supposedly "underlying" construction in any systematic way, and so you can posit anything you need to in that construction to guarantee the predictions of your theory - hence, unfalsifiable.) I also find "scrambling" to be inherently implausible as a theory of human cognition, but that's a separate issue.
So given it's inherent unfalsifiability, the question of yes or no Minimalism is ultimately one of a balance of plausibility - is this particular framework more plausible than the alternatives? But that is, in turn, a somewhat subjective question. What theoretical virtues do you consider important, and which less so? What forms of parsimony do you favour? What evidence do you consider, and what interpretative frameworks do you apply to that evidence (e.g. is the question "can Minimalism explain this evidence", or "can another theory explain this evidence better")?
For example, psychological plausibility is a pretty key criterion for linguistic theory selection in my opinion, as I believe our goal should be to model language qua a human behaviour that exists in a psychosocial context, and there are lost of psychologically implausible components of standard Minimalist analyses (such as scrambling, traces, etc.). If, however, you don't care about psychological plausibility because you are only interested in modelling language qua a formal system isolated and seperated from any actual human activity, then this sort of argument wouldn't hold any weight.
Or we could think about parsimony. Minimalism is called "minimalism" because it strives for a particular kind of parsimony - namely, a parsimony of operations (ideally reduced to just one or two syntactic operations). But this parsimony of operations results in incredibly bloated structures, a proliferation of categories, and a very computationally complex derivational process. By contrast, something like Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) has highly parsimonious construction and much simpler structures than a Minimalist analysis, and thus is more minimal than Minimalism in these respects, but at the cost of having many more rules of construction. Which form of parsimony you prefer will depend on both your other theoretical commitments, and your own theoretical preferences and assumptions.
Ultimately, we need to remember that linguistics is still a very young science, very much in its infancy, and we know much less than we think we do about language - like early chemists who tried to understand all chemical reactions in terms of a handful of base metals, or physicists trying to understand combustion in terms of phlogiston. Likely none of our present linguistic theories will ultimately stand the test of time, at least not without serious revision.
(E.g. some of my own research presents a serious challenge to the core LFG assumptions about grammatical functions, so in a sense I would also argue that LFG is "wrong" as a theory in its standard formulations - just less wrong than Minimalism, in my opinion.)
So calling Minimalism "wrong" as a theory was mostly hyperboly and a bit of a joke. Well, it is strictly wrong in the scientific antirealist sense, but in that sense no more so than any other framework. But I do find it a highly implausible theory, one which continues a particular analytical tradition which we as a scientific community should really have outgrown by now. The description of languages like Warlpiri and Jiwarli should have been the death-knell for derivationalist syntax, and the fact they have not suggests a theoretical conservativism which is only going to hinder the development of linguistics into a mature science.
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