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Notes -
I did not bring up the crusades and as you point out they are not relevant, so I don't see why you have to reflexively bring up Riley-Smith. The existence of the juvenis as a class generated by primogeniture, which is Duby's central relevant claim here is far less controversial.
And if that is criticized it's under the auspices of primogeniture not being as universal as he assumed, not because it can't mechanically generate the social class he names and its set of incentives.
As to the Nian Rebellion, I'm just going to straight up link the article that makes the relevant claim https://kar.kent.ac.uk/11430/1/surplus_men_IS_article.pdf I think it's a bit silly to deny that the Guang gun existed as a class because you want to believe bandit slogans literally.
Moreover, these are but the most famous examples, you can draw from an almost endless well here, James Barrett or Ben Raffield have made this same argument for the Viking invasions among others: https://profmarkcollard.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Raffield-et-al-2017-EHB.pdf
The claim that a surplus of unmarried men generates social instability because it creates incentives for defection and banditry is supported by a lot of cross discipline scholarship. I could also have mentionned the work of Laura Betzig which goes over a similar argument on 104 societies, surely that's numerous examples enough: https://www.academia.edu/48337408/Despotism_and_Differential_Reproduction_A_Darwinian_View_of_History
Now it's not airtight and beyond question, what is in social sciences, but the idea that this widely shared and not fringe at all thesis is something that an "historically aware" person could dismiss it out of hand is ridiculous.
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