I agree on the consensus thinking. There are always going to be people whose whole careers are built around certain theories, and have much to lose if the theory is discarded. The thing with the timing of the exodus is very interesting to me. An agnostic archaeologist called David Rohl has been looking at this issue for a while.
He claims that part of the confusion is concerning who was the Pharaoh at the time of the exodus. The guy who used the Rosetta stone to enable translation of hieroglyphs apparently mixed up two similar sounding Pharaoh’s. I think the names were Shishak and Shoshenk in the Egyptian. One of them was Ramases and the other I can’t remember. Anyhows, if you or anyone else is interested in the revision of the timeline of the exodus, look up David Rohl or watch Patterns of Evidence.
And if you ae interested in a fuller description of the enormous dating problems and more on consensus thinking read Robert Temple’s “Egyptian Dawn” and “the Sphinx Mystery” (both have websites - further Temple has not published in 8 years, despite several manuscripts which are still unpublished). Temple visited and photographed all the sites he worked at; he includes numerous previously unpublished or long forgotten photos and reports from travelers (tourists) going back to the 17th Century as well as many articles translated for the first time from German and French.
One site, the Sphinx Temple is closed to tourists and the images unique.