Eeeeeeh, I feel a lot of the anti-paleo furor that is springing up is actually serving to mask some really useful advice. The modern American diet is entirely too heavy on refined starches. Too much white bread, too many potatoes, heavy HFCS, tons of sugar, and too much white rice. It's not uncommon for refined starches to comprise upwards of 50% of a typical meal. After accidentally bumping into a few different paleo supporters I decided to modify my diet to eat ~50% vegetable, ~25% meat, and ~25% starch, preferably non-refined starches. (sweet potatoes, whole grains, etc).

And within ~1 week or so I genuinely felt better. Yah, I admit there's no way to know if it's just the placebo effect. Even so, there's no way this diet is worse for me than a diet that 50% or more refined carbs, and ~10% veg. And it's definitely a lot easier on insulin spikes which is proven to have an overall positive benefit to long term health.

I feel like a lot of rage against paleo themed diets is keeping people happy with their pizza and burgers without challenging themselves to see if there are better, more healthy options out there.

I don't know, I've been on and off Keto for almost 4 years, for me that's the only thing that works . Just cutting out sugars by itself you will lose weight (For me anyways) but yeh carbs are what need to be trimmed back. I still eat all sorts of meats and cheeses.