The equivalent of the ‘Is it potato cake or potato scallop?’ debate in academia is ‘Why should we care about research method?’ It’s a zero-stakes argument because the people who care about methods mostly ignore the people who don’t, and the people who don’t care about methods don’t understand the people who do. If anything, the argument has subzero-stakes as the people who argue against method largely don’t know what methods they’re arguing against. Giants really didn’t care that Don Quixote was tilting at a windmill.
As a person who would very, very happily teach research methods for the rest of his life, I am on the ‘Research method is good!’ side of the argument and, fundamentally, I don’t really care about what the ‘Research method is bad!’ side of the argument is talking about. The arguments I see from them don’t seem to be discussing research methods at all, but some kind of imagined dogmatism that I don’t think I’ve encountered from serious research methods people. What I do care about is good scholarship, and the thing that distinguishes good scholarship from bad scholarship is good research method. It is as simple as that. If people want to disagree with that, then they’re going to need to start explaining at which windmill they are tilting.