One really oughtn't downplay their research skills like this, rather they should wear them as a badge of honor. Downplaying them leeches away one's power.

Ph.D. researchers may potentially go deeper into sources, but this is only a function of time and available attention.

This sort of debate also plays out in spaces like writing computer code. The broader industry determines who is and isn't a "coder", but this is only a means of creating power structures that determine who has power and who doesn't or who is part of the conversation and who isn't.

Don't let Maggie fool you here, she is definitely part of this conversation.

What areas of work over time does this pattern of level of experience not apply to?

There is definitely a level of minimal literacy at which one could be considered a reader, but there is no distinction between amateur reader and professional reader the way there might be between an "amateur researcher" and a full time "academic researcher".

Other examples of this? Video game playing?

https://twitter.com/augmented_CI

The words "beyond", "hierarchical", and "archaic" are all designed to marginalize prior thought and tools which all work, and are likely upon which this broader idea is built. This is a potentially toxic means of creating "power over" this prior art rather than a more open spirit of "power with".

Enlightenment-era salons were led by women facilitators, but they have largely been marginalized since for their contributions.

(reference?)

This formulation almost makes it sound like marginalized folks are to blame.

Kadambari, S., & Vanderslott, S. (2021). Lessons about COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among minority ethnic people in the UK. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, S1473309921004047. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00404-7

There is, however, an exceptionally long tradition of moving one's annotations out of the margins and into more expansive spaces like commonplace books, zettelkasten, wikis, Memex, and digital gardens...

This cultural thinking pattern also isn't confined by literacy either. Dr. Lynne Kelly attests the idea of the storage of ideas and their subsequent potential revision in oral cultures in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture. One may have lost the ability to track the original ideas in time, but the (useful) oral "annotations" were aggregated into cultural knowledge over time.

It almost looks like BIPOC was invented to give all of these people space, but in making it an acronym, we've given them all the least amount of space possible.

It's definitely worth considering something else.

Bartusevicius, H., Bor, A., Jørgensen, F. J., & Petersen, M. B. (2020). The psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic drives anti-systemic attitudes and political violence [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ykupt