>I'm 6'1 and 190-200lb, and I went from 130g to 80g a day of protein for the last year and have only gained more lean mass.
And everything else was held constant? Moreover the claim isn't that you need absurdly high amounts of protein to build muscle, just that it's easier to build muscle if you have higher protein intake, all things being equal.
I just don't see it. The main connection I see is with calorie intake being slightly above vs below maintenance. How does "easier" quantify? What if it's a technically true statement but you're just talking about 2%?
It's like when you hear that steaming vegetables retains more nutrients than boiling them so everyone repeats this bit of trivia, but then you find out it's talking about a 7% difference so who cares.
I have the opposite opinion - if criticism like this is so obvious (and it is), then it's up to the article to refute it immediately - this saves time of everyone reading it and gives it more credibility.
You can tell who never looks studies up on scihub because they have no idea that multivariate modeling for confounders (especially income and education) is something pretty much every study does, so it makes no sense to assume you just blindly outsmarted the study when you thought of the first confounder that came to your mind.
Yet it everyone else's responsibility to defend casual mention of every study from a critique you came up in 5 seconds.