It is considered “fringe” only by people who want to call it that, not because they have provided sound empirical and reasoned refutations for it.
Actually ID isn’t even a ‘fringe’ Scientific view, it is an anti-Scientific view. Primitive man saw lightning and explained it by a Sky-god throwing mystic bolts. Reasonable man flew a kite with a key and found that it was ‘electricity’, a earthly phenomenon that could be produced and measured. Now “Intelligent Meteorologists” explain that the static charge of the atmosphere is insufficient to produce bolts of lightning without the intervention of a lighting ‘designer’.
ID gives up the ghost on common descent and the age of the earth, only to say that the system of mutational divergence and natural selection that is inherent in the system of life created by God is somehow a weak mechanism and insufficient to the task; so like a child with a poorly designed radio controlled car, he has to reach down and turn the wheel by hand.
It is piss poor theology and shoddy philosophy and it is not Science, not until you can measure the designer (HE who is beyond all measure).