You are attacking a straw man to make your arguments which makes me question your motivations.
Nowhere did the substack author say that cinting anonymous sources is not a thing, which your wording is implying. They say that citing anonymous sources to discuss an ongoing investigation is not a valid reason.
Let's look at the guidelines for ethical journalism and they quote the NYTimes guidelines: anonymous sources... “should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.”
"... journalists should use anonymous sources only when essential and to give readers as much information as possible about the anonymous source’s credentials"
Nowhere did the substack author say that cinting anonymous sources is not a thing, which your wording is implying. They say that citing anonymous sources to discuss an ongoing investigation is not a valid reason.
Let's look at the guidelines for ethical journalism and they quote the NYTimes guidelines: anonymous sources... “should be used only for information that we believe is newsworthy and credible, and that we are not able to report any other way.”
"... journalists should use anonymous sources only when essential and to give readers as much information as possible about the anonymous source’s credentials"
https://ethicsandjournalism.org/resources/best-practices/bes...
So the question is were these anonymous sources essential to the story? Have they given enough information about the sources credentials?