Here’s an example of an honest-to-God scientific controversy where the researchers were eventually proven “right” (i.e. it is now the majority opinion, though it still has its detractors) - the Alvarez hypotheses of dinosaur extinction. I took my first college biology course in the Fall of 1985, when the idea was still fairly new and the consensus was fairly anti-Alvarez. My biology professors were dubious, primarily based on the timing of extinctions. It was interesting enough to be broached in classrooms, but was considered one of a number of scenarios and one of the less likely. Luis Alvarez himself was an aggressive blowhard who did not hesitate to publicly shit on his and his son’s critics, which did not endear himself to the paleontology/biology community. But by and large their hypothesis seems to have prevailed in the debate.
You got it all - a physicist and a geologist weighing in on a controversy in a different field, paleontology. The lead researcher was a piece of work, happy to call his opponents idiots. The hypothesis was considered clever but sensationalist and was largely held to be unlikely by the scientific community.
However you’ll note the difference between them and a crank like Malone. They were presented with an intriguing problem, bounced it off other scientists, did careful investigation and then published a peer-reviewed paper in a prestigious journal. Their evidence was quite real, the only question was whether it proved what they hypothesized it did. More importantly their hypothesis was testable and over a thirty-year period more and more evidence gradually came to light and more research was published vindicating their initial idea. Now it is the rough consensus. This is how science is done.
Malone isn’t doing science. He is doing what the brilliant Linus Pauling did for vitamin C advocacy, only far less so. Picking up on an idea that he found intellectually appealing and stubbornly running with it despite research mostly debunking the premise.