Hasn't the symbolic vs statistical split in AI existed for a long time? With things like Cyc growing out of the former. I'm not too familiar with linguistics but maybe this extends there too, since I think Chomsky was heavy on formal grammars over probabilistic models [1].

Must be some sort of cognitive sunk cost fallacy, after dedicating your life to one sect, it must be emotionally hard to see the other "keep winning". Of course you'd root for them to fall.

[1] https://norvig.com/chomsky.html