Interesting.
But, this article states theory as fact in many places. I would still like to see statements that replace "is" and "was" with something like "according to the BBT" or "according to the standard quantum model of physics".
Constantly writing (and teaching) that some theorized condition or event is fundamentally true is teaching people to not think "outside the box".
But, as clearly indicated in such articles, that "box' is incomplete, even if not completely wrong.
So, people who think outside that box are going to be needed to advance our scientific understanding.
For instance, the theory that the universe was created in a flash from pure energy 13.8 billion years ago has major problems, one of which is not being able to explain why there are not equal amounts of matter and antimatter today.
We need to keep in mind that perhaps the matter we see today was not created 13.8 billion years ago by some process that would also create an equal amount of antimatter. And that includes the possibility that the matter we see today was not created in a Big Band at all.
I came to the comments to say something similar. The Big Bang model is good, and probably the best explanation for the evidence we have. However, we haven't really had enough evidence to treat it like it is essentially 100% certain. There has always been room for interpretation, for as long as we don't have answers to things like the matter-antimatter imbalance, higher frequency of stellar mergers than predicted, large galaxies/quasars only a few hundred million years after the predicted formation of the universe, the "Lithium Problem", the Final Parsec Problem, and the Hubble Tension. Add to that not yet having detected CMB B-Modes with any certainty, haven't found any unambiguous population III stars, nor confirmed Dark Matter is a new particle. Not to mention that we frankly have no idea what Dark Energy is beyond what we believe it does.
None of these things invalidate the Big Bang Theory, but it's certainly enough for any practiced scientist to acknowledge uncertainty. Unfortunately, suggesting that any significant detail about the Big Bang is wrong--is career suicide. It's become a culture. Fortunately, JWST has finally cracked some of the cosmologists' resistance to acknowledging we don't know the BBT is 100% correct--and never had enough information to act like we did.
As somebody with a graduate degree in aerospace engineering, I can understand what evidence we have for the BB--and I have never believed that we can treat it like a foregone conclusion, or even with so much as a 75% certainty. There are just too many assumptions about observed phenomena behaving how we expect it to--when we can't confirm that they do so on a cosmic scale. At some point, it becomes easier to explain the problems with other theories, than it does to come up with hot dark matter and primordial black holes to keep the 13.8 billion year old universe idea alive.
As such, we really can't say "despite the fact that matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts at the dawn of time" --It's much too far from being something we can confirm, and if we don't observe equal amounts, that's just as much evidence for an anomaly with the Big Bang Theory--as it is evidence for the Big Bang Theory not correctly predicting how matter and antimatter formed.
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