Such wild inconsistencies are not limited to Tom but seem fundamental to the FE view. Tron claims space craft exist (JWST, Voyager, etc) but does not acknowledge that all launches depend on RE physics. The real question is whether anyone actually thinks the earth is flat or if its all a sort of trolling or self deception? There might be some trolling going on here (claiming a position that you do not actually hold), but the shape of the earth is not something that matters to most people's lives so self deception might be in play even more.
If one genuinely thought that the earth was flat clearly they are not going to be employed where that does not work (long haul airline pilot, geographer, GPS engineer, NASA-pretty-much-anything, etc). But traveling to the corner store is going to work no matter what global map you claim. People can hold that GPS is somehow based on ground stations, that we know can not be the case, and still use it. They can point their Sat TV dish at the location of the geosynchronous satellite and tell themselves the signal is bouncing off the dome. They can claim a vast global conspiracy of 100s of thousands if not millions yet all keeping totally silent for decades, again as it does not impact their day to day life. I'm guessing that such folks are drawn to the view of themselves of not accepting the standard model everyone else acknowledges. That they like the self image of being one that thinks way way outside the box and doing so for the shape of the earth does not involve any changes to your daily life for most folks.
The impact is to our civilization where folks holding clearly false notions about reality is a worrisome trend. Not so much for FE/RE but for elections, pandemics, climate change etc it does matter. If that can not be resolved even for the shape of the earth how can we do so for other domains that are even more impactful yet require more trust of experts than FE/RE and are more vulnerable to vested interests than FE/RE?