> I suspect the mistake here is imagining a past era in which humanity formed "consensus reality" out of evidence and reason. It can certainly appear that way to us today due to some super-strong publication bias effects since the Enlightenment era.

At least from the Newtonian perspective, reality definitely unfolds either one way or the other, and it's not a matter of opinion.

> There has never been a prior time in which a greater percentage of humanity had the means and the inclination to build a well-founded knowledge base and use it to critically assess incoming information.

This is definitionally Harari's naive view of information, which "says that information leads to truth, and knowing the truth helps people to gain both power and wisdom." You miss the point of the root comment.