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billswift comments on Scholarship: how to tell good advice from bad advice? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The best single rule I have found is useful for academic disciplines as well: "Everybody overstates the accuracy, applicability, universality, precision, or other some other aspects of claims they have made." Anybody who actually cares enough about something to go through the trouble of writing it up, unless they are being paid by the word (which as you note has its own problems), is going to be emotionally invested in their work and writings. So my best advice is to assume from the beginning that it is overstated, and consider a weaker version, or a charitable interpretation, of their claims.
As someone who cares a lot about accuracy, I feel that you are overstating this point. ("Most people" in place of "Anybody" seems more plausible.)
I read that as "take as a starting point, the assumption that the idea is overstated" - it's simply a base assumption, if you lack any further information. If you know you're dealing with someone who highly values accuracy, then you can rely on that information. But it's not a good default assumption to assume people value accuracy highly (except possibly in certain highly-specialized sub-cultures)