I’d love to hear a well-supported counter-argument.

If the Big Five are not universal, stable, or orthogonal, what good are they? They have a perfectly clear use. They replicate: the answers to many other survey instruments can be found to correlate with the Big Five survey responses, in multiple samples of survey-takers. To complain that the Big Five are meaningless is somewhat unscientific. They have a very specific meaning within the language game they belong to, and they are popular and memetically successful tools within that sphere.

The Big Five are, in a sense, protected from falsification. They make no predictions; there is no underlying causal model. As I understand it, no study could be devised to prove that the Big Five aren’t real, because they make no formal pretense to reality. They are innocent mathematical constructs that fall out of particular survey instruments administered to particular populations.

https://carcinisation.com/2020/07/04/the-ongoing-accomplishment-of-the-big-five/#more-732