In academia and research its amazing how myopic people can potentially get. A random example was when I was an undergrad taking mechanical engineering courses, I had a tenured professor publicly call me an "idiot" after an exam for pointing out that his method of calculating the drag coeffect of a typical passenger car was potentially in error as the "correct" answer on the exam was a Cd of 0.8 rather than the more typical Cd of 0.35. I think even Hummers are more aerodynamic than that. And he concluded that such a low drag coefficient for cars was completely absurd! And by his model (and for certain types of open-wheel cars) the number it gave was correct. A classic case of circular logic. But, at no point did he decide to do some simple research to see what some ballpark values were before formulating it and making it an exam question in a mechanical engineering course that people have to answer. It may seem trivial, but when 10% of your final course grade depends on having to force yourself to be wrong or face a public flogging for your "insolence", its not. And that was a common theme for college when I was there. The lack of any practical grounding in reality much of the time was one thing I did not like. And this carried on when I went to work at a research center. Smart people sometimes doing and saying dumb things. It does happen.
In all honesty its easy to do really stupid things when you don't have all the information. In your frame of reference its "correct", but in absolute terms its not. The oft cliché Dunning-Kruger effect. It seems silly, but I have done the exact same thing myself at times. He could have ulterior motives or be dishonest, but we should also not discount the ability to deceive ourselves if we try hard enough
But, I do wish he would actually have them legitimately peer reviewed. I'm sure he is a good astrophysicist, but it does call into question his methodologies if he doesn't ever consider getting timely feedback before firing off the next paper to maintain relevance. If he does it knowingly then I would not even take his work in his field of expertise seriously without doing my own research first. It just shows very poor ethics.