As a data point, I had mostly only seen what the author is complaining about in the past, with articles having more of the "you won't believe what ancient statues actually looked like" angle and implying that it's just our taste that changed.

So I definitely feel that I was misled by what I had read and seen about painted statues (though I was always a bit sceptical), even though everything I'd seen was from secondary sources (news sites etc.), and not articles or papers written by the reconstructioninsts themselves, so I don't blame them directly.