I have noticed this too. I've only ever read him off and on, and I get the feeling that he must have written something during one of the periods I wasn't reading his still at all that got him "canceled", but I have no idea what it was.
When the American Left split into progressive and liberal camps in the mid 2010s, the rationalist and adjacent communities underwent a huge internal conflict. Scott and a lot of his orbit tend to stay on the liberal side which these days is called and often calls itself "centrist". The aftermath of the split has had pretty huge effects in most Western spaces. A lot of the progressive left is really angry at the centrist left wing and many centrists think the progressive left is misguided and hate on them. The hate that Scott gets is largely a fallout from this schism.
He seems to get more hate than more mainstream people on the more centrist side of that split... Granted, they do all get hate, and your description does resonate. But he still seems to be an outlier.
He was considered a core, visible member of the rationalist community from well before the split. For better or for worse he is considered a figurehead of the movement. With the acrimony of the split there was no way he was going to escape unscathed no matter which side he ended up on just by sheer visibility of his writing.
But it's not rationalists mad about this split who seem to have outsized vitriol for him. It seems to me that it's people who were not involved in that community to begin with.
My read has always been that the angry folks were always rationalist adjacent even if they weren't rationalists themselves. There's a lot of people in my IRL network, for example, who are 1-3 degrees of separation from Scott or Yud but have never posted about them or in the rationalist blogspace at all.
In the schism the other person replying to you is talking about, Scott didn’t go fully into the far left progressive ideology when it happened so therefore he’s a traitor since he should “know better”.
One tenant of the progressive thinking is if you know their argument then you must agree with them because they’re “right”. So you’re either ignorant or evil - there’s no room for smart people that just think they’re wrong. They know Scott isn’t ignorant so therefore he must be evil.
My other comment got flag killed because I mentioned the core group I think is responsible for this kind of thinking within that community.
