I have not read the author in question, so I am only going to make a small comment on financial conflicts of interest for psychologists and others in related fields:

Due to the current funding structure of research, especially large-scale research of assessments and interventions, most psychologists who develop programs or standardized assessments will at some point have to develop a relationship with a (major) publishing company in order to collect the kind of data-to-scale that is most desirable and publishable. Public and NGO funding is generally not sufficient to run any kind of standardization or efficacy studies larger than a couple of hundred students, so researchers who hope to collect that kind of data on thousands of students almost always have to develop a relationship with a publisher at some point.

And if you want it to be adopted by any significant numbers, you definitely need the marketing muscle of a Pearson or Riverside.

So yes, one needs to be cognizant of financial interests, but also acknowledge that the system currently resists "pure" research in certain domains.

...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...