Here's Sabine's take on "the big bang didn't happen" articles:
https://nautil.us/the-trouble-with-the-big-bang-238547/
For what it's worth, here are the comments of Leonardo Ferreira, the lead author of the Panic! paper that Lerner mentions. This is from Brian Keating's YT channel;
"The paper is concerned with the rest-frame optical of galaxies at z>3, which Hubble could not observe. A lot of what we are seeing is that, those galaxies that were observed more to the UV, can now be observed spatially in the optical, so @Dr Brian Keating is correct to show that for galaxies well resolved in Hubble, nothing changes. And we still see lot's of mergers though, it's not like they are absent. And some of the disks can be undergoing mergers as well. One particular point that is interesting for follow up studies is that, for example, galaxies could reform disks after mergers more easily than we thought previously. The paper has nothing to do with the Big Bang. We don't even go that far back, ~1 billion years after the BB.
I think Lerner case is that he is not even wrong. He needs to get more things right to be even wrong."
&
"that's not really a prediction, that is obvious. JWST was built for this, to resolve what HST can't. With the same amount of light distributed in its shape, extended disks are fainter than compact spheroids, so no surprise we see clearer by having a larger collecting area, better resolution and improved wavelength coverage.
You can have massive disks, that is not a problem, and we see mergers, and spheroids, and clumpy galaxies, it is all there. Your last statement is completely wrong, I'm afraid. The high luminosity galaxies found with JWST (which none is part of my paper), do not have spectra yet so we can not infer distances properly. Also galaxies can grow without mergers, in fact, SF and accretion from the environment is as good as mergers to build up mass. And they do not undergo several big mergers in their lifetime to build its mass, they only go through a few, 1-2 based on our current understanding of the merger rates.
Finally, there are several papers out there showing evidence for cosmological dimming. I saw Lerner say a couple of times that galaxies don't get bigger at higher z, therefore big bang is wrong, but he fails to account that distant galaxies are intrinsically smaller. The research group that I'm part of has dozens of papers on the subject. There is no single result/evidence that we find that it is conflicting with the big bang. All this controversy to me comes across as Lerner not doing his homework, and ignoring fundamental results."
Nothing to see here. Move along. It is Lerner, after all!