How do academic economists view discretionary global macro investors?

I’ve noticed that many discretionary global macro investors (Soros, Druckenmiller, Pozsar) often describe the economy in terms of:

• monetary transmission,
• funding markets,
• liquidity regimes,
• dealer balance sheets,
• collateral chains/shadow banking,
• and interactions between central banks and financial markets.

This seems to be quite different from the way macroeconomics is taught academically, and these practitioners also don’t appear to rely heavily on formal econometric models.

• Is this considered a legitimate framework for understanding the economy and financial markets, or mostly intuition/storytelling after the fact?
• Is there a serious academic basis for the “liquidity / balance sheet / market plumbing” approach to macro investing?
• Do economists generally think discretionary macro traders can genuinely identify macro mispricings and forecast asset prices over 3–24 month horizons? Or is this viewed mostly as luck/survivorship bias?
• How are people like Soros or Druckenmiller viewed inside economics academia? Are they seen as deep thinkers with real insight into macroeconomic dynamics?