A simple comparison might help: while from the outside this likely looks like the famous "leftist yells at leftist" scenario, the alternative - where a single expert has their theories elevated into law, without room for disagreement, looks a lot like Lysenkoism, and usually results in large-scale suffering with no scientific value (due to mistakes, large or small, in individual theories).
I'm not in this field and can't hazard a guess at the exact utility of this dispute, but when I see specialists and the impassioned debating vigorously on their principles, I trust it's because of relevant disagreements in the field, because that's what I observe in my preferred domain. Some amount of slapfighting is inevitable - we're all human - but this is a particularly humane way to hash out differences.