They mistook my epistemological interest in Bayes as like... ideological alignment, I guess. This is how I learned 1. that there were fierce debates in the recent past and 2. most people in biology don't like them or consider them productive.

I'm not sure that the debates were even THAT recent. I think your professsors are worried about a common failure mode that sometimes creeps up- people like to think they know the "one true way" to do statistics (or really any problem) and so they start turning every problem into a nail so that they can keep using their hammer, instead of using appropriate methodology to the problem at hand.

I see this a fair amount in data mining, where certain people ONLY use neural nets, and certain people ONLY use various GLMs and extensions and sometimes get overly-heated about it.