You make some good points. I'd expect that any leaders of a group who become puffed up by fame are likely to abuse some of their privileges. It doesn't matter whether they're new atheists or Catholics, liberals or conservatives. We all tend to be corrupted by power. That's what follows from the philosophy I've worked out in these writings (link below, for example), and that's what's commonsensical too.
So it's no surprise if success goes to people's heads, including new atheists, especially if we're talking about aging ones like Dawkins. That has to do with power, fame, and tribalism, not with specifically with atheism. There are incorruptible characters out there, but they're exceptions that prove the rule.
On the other hand, some of those complaints against new atheist leaders may be hysterical , hyperfeminine, and petty.
I've written on scientism in philosophy, economics, and liberalism (some links below), but I'm not familiar with what Sacks says about it. Are you talking about Rabbi Sacks? The rabbi seems to agree with Gould's point about the non-overlapping magisteria. Science takes things apart to see how they work, Sacks says, and religion puts them back together to see what they mean.
A scientismist would say there's no religious knowledge. The scientific method, encompassing philosophical reasoning more broadly, is the only way to obtain knowledge. So finding meaning through speculation, personification, ritual, myth-making and so on doesn't count as knowledge.
The problem with that scientistic line is that there's more than one type of knowledge, as John Vervaeke points out. There's practical, procedural knowledge which is nonpropositional, the know-how we obtain by interacting with the world (embodied cognition). Then there's perspectival knowledge, the sense of being in an environment, our situation awareness. Lastly, he says, there's participatory knowledge, the feeling of being embedded and in dialogue with reality.
I don't follow Vervaeke all the way to Daoism, but I see no reason to think the brain obtains reliable information about the world only via propositions that are tested by logic and experiment. The brain has an intuitive, artistic side, too, and whether we call it knowledge-producing is largely a semantic matter.
However, that hardly means that everything religion does is valid and respectable.
In any case, scientism isn't a well thought-out idea. It's more like a prejudice against the humanities, part of CP Snow's point about the two cultures in academia.
