Is there a generational thing that causes people to say "data is" vs. "data are" in this context? Because to me "data are" sounds so egregiously wrong it takes me seconds to focus on anything else.
Prescriptivist "data" is plural because it comes from the cartographical term "datum". Descriptivists say it's singular because nobody in the 400 years has used the term in an information context while referring to the geodetic datum.
This is the equivalent of the Washington Post being snobby by saying that technically a tomato turns it into a fruit salad.
I get stuck on it as well, I'm probably wrong but to me "data" is the collective noun like "team" or "family". This is why I think it sounds wrong to use "Data are" when it is being used as the singular, eg the "data" being clear. If the data was unclear or split you would usually use something else to contextualize the difference. Eg, the time-series data disagrees with our event data.
