Thanks. For what it's worth, I too had an experience similar to the author's. I didn't come from a Catholic background like the author. I became a Christian as a teenager from a Protestant teenager telling me about Christ. I've been serious about the Lord ever since and always with a Protestant bent.
But here in Alabama decades ago I realized that some of the different churches taught bad things about each other across denominations. I recognized this as a teenager, as did many of my friends whom were in other denominations. We read the Bible on our own and visited each others' churches / Bible studies a lot. We concluded that many of the churches cherry picked the verses to teach a few tangent points instead of reading an entire chapter or entire book to teach a more holistic topic.
That put me on a quest to learn as much as I could about the Bible, how the different English translations were done, how original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words were used, what was going on in the lives of the people at the times different portions were written, etc. That also put me on a quest to learn about church history, i.e. how much of my own beliefs in 70+% Protestant Alabama was tainted or whatever by whatever beliefs might have changed since the New Testament scripture were written.
What I found was very similar to what the author found. Some of our practices have changed over the years (i.e. Protestants are the ones who made worship music during a service a regular thing). But Martin Luther's 5 Solas mirrored the summaries of teachings on how our early church fathers summarized the Bible. A strong argument could be made that the 5 Solas teaching of Luther was a simple but effective attempt to bring the core teachings back to what the western church believe pre Pope Leo.
Take for instance the phrase "apostolic succession". We've all heard that phrase used to argue for the authority of the Pope and sometimes for the authority of priests. But our early church fathers used that phrase not for those purposes, but to make a case that it was only through scripture we can know the true teachings. In other words, the phrase "apostolic succession" used by Catholics today was originally used for a sola scriptura argument. Only the teachings that succeeded from the apostles can be known to be truly accurate.
So us Protestants shouldn't completely turn away Catholic tradition. I argue that we can embrace it as long as we get to the source of the traditions and know how they were originally intended, not how they were abused for power.
Not really.
See, for example, Ignatius of Antioch on the authority of the bishop.