Hmm. Every major post I can remember that talks about meditation has comment sections that are full of skepticism and hesitation, I myself wrote a lot of those comments. Scott Alexander has been engaging skeptically with all the meditation stuff for at least two years. Skepticism towards meditation-related things is not a recent thing, and has been pretty widespread ever since I've started being active in the community around 6 years ago.

Somewhat related: Who is the "they" that you are talking about ? The things you say don't sound to me like the things that I've heard from people arguing for meditation on LessWrong. More concretely, risks from meditation have been acknowledged and discussed since the very beginning, and, if anything, I think are usually overstated. I really don't think people have described meditation as "all benefits and no problems". Again, I myself am highly skeptical of a lot of the enlightenment/meditation stuff, but the things you say really don't seem to map onto past discussions on this site.

I've also never heard anyone argue for having unmediated direct perception of reality, at least not in a way that anyone took seriously, because yes, I agree that that doesn't make sense. The argument that has been made is that meditation, to a certain degree, allows you more accurate access to your own mind and how you process information, which is a testable claim that can be disputed (and I am myself skeptical of), but is drastically different from claiming "unmediated access to reality".

I also really don't like the repeated linking to fallacies and biases. Since none of the above are responding to concrete individuals making concrete cognitive motions, it's unclear what they are supposed to indicate. My current sense is that in this comment, they do more harm than good, in the way Eliezer wrote about in "Knowing about biases can hurt people".

Like, this comment feels really scarily close to what feels to me like the average Reddit comment on political subreddits. There is a concrete outgroup that gets described, which then gets made fun of by putting words in its mouth that are extreme caricatures of what has actually historically been voiced, and the group is described as part of some oppressive regime that has to be toppled by the underdogs who actually know what really is going on.

I think there are reasonable criticisms to be made of how people are engaging with meditation, and a lot of it is very justified (as is the Scott article linked above), but this comments seems like it drastically misconstrues opinion in the community, and then goes on to dramatically strawman dozens of people who tried to make real arguments in a way that makes me really uncomfortable.