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I'm not sure what follow-up to Radicalizing the Romanceless you're talking about, but from the summary I don't see the inconsistency. Recognizing that a problem is real, but disagreeing with its strongest activists' proposed solution and throwing your hands up helplessly, is a very common and coherent position on all sorts of controversial issues. (For example, I agree the plight of the Palestinians is worthy of sympathy, but have some pretty unsolvable disagreements with Hamas on what ought to be done about it. Surely I can express these two points even if I have no alternative miracle-solution to put forward?)
Scott himself puts forth a few ideas in the now-linked essay before dismissing them all. In general there are loads of potential policy ideas of many different strengths for encouraging people to pair up, discouraging them from behaviour that makes pairing up difficult, and facilitating people finding matches.
The Israeli-Hamas conflict is intractable because both groups want the same land, they can’t both get it, they both consider the conflict existential, they have powerful backers and they’re willing to be extremely violent. In contrast the problem of inceldom and birth rates is very tractable and historically was a mostly solved problem, it’s just that seriously discussing it gets you nobbled.
The answer to inceldom is not a tractable problem; the incels today mostly would not have been successful romantically/sexually in 1955 either. Granted, he would have been a different young man in 1955, and that young man would have done ok with the ladies, and probably would today too.
Seriously the incels' problem is with their behavior/attitude and that's unfixable. It's not because they're short.
Let’s say maybe 20% of the population is ‘long term without a relationship and unhappy about it’ as opposed to the specific incel subculture. (I freely concede that this number is pulled from thin air and intuition!)
My thesis is that about 15% of these people (us) are this way because relationships explicitly became opt-in rather than opt-out. I think it was @MaiqTheTrue who said that in the modern age things that everyone used to be able to do because they had no choice now split into skilled enthusiasts and unskilled avoiders. Incels being the latter.
In other times and places it was not this way. A friend of mine went back to his country after university and his parents immediately sat him down and said, “These are the sixteen eligible girls in our community, which would you like us to contact first?” Clearly such a society will have more men in relationships! And indeed the marriage rate for young men at 30 used to be much higher than it is now.
Many other potential policies have been floated on this forum: cracking down on men who juggle multiple girls, escalating taxes for singleness, government or church-organised speed dating, Victorian-England style ‘coming out’, and more drastic stuff. Arguments can be made against all of these but those arguments do have to be made.
At the risk of offending, I believe that ‘well, you don’t have a girlfriend/boyfriend because you have a bad personality’ is one of those evolved rejoinders that people use to avoid thinking about the problem. It’s trivially true, in the general form of ‘if you were the kind of person who could X, you would X’. And there are people who obviously have physical and mental deformities that render them unlovable, if backing evidence is required.
So people on the receiving end of this argument tend to shrink in on themselves and agree meekly to avoid humiliation, and people on the using end get to avoid having to defend a system they’re basically okay with. I don’t mean to aim this at you specifically, but I think this is how the debate generally goes and why.
I sort of agree with you- being a normal person who settles down in a serious relationship became opt-in at some point, so some people got worse at it. But some people got worse at it is the actual mechanics of the thing even if not the root cause. Your hypothetical young man in 1955 didn't have the option to not date a lass seriously but he was also less likely to be addicted to porn, video games, or weed, had better social skills, and also was much more likely to be stably employed. Likewise your hypothetical young woman of the time was thinner, better at home economics(not that fifties cooking was in general very good[it wasn't] but that the women who straight up can't cook or keep a house weren't really a thing), and more pleasant to deal with on average. 'Pass' is a valid selection and for the bottom whatever percent of appealing partners I don't particularly blame them for taking it as regards their opposite sex equivalent.
I'm totally in favor of social/community support for solving these problems, and I do in fact spend time thinking about the problem. But the fact remains that both sexes are less appealing as partners on average- physically, due to obesity, social skills wise, expectations wise(there was no sexting before smart phones, and while I'm not delusional enough to think that courtship between the two sexual revolutions had a high rate of waiting til the wedding night there wasn't much sex on the first date either), in terms of maturity, etc. This is an actual problem that has to be solved in order to make these community support mechanisms functional.
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