I was having an interesting discussion a while ago on Reddit about Brett Devereaux's This. Isn't. Sparta., which (I think) follows the argument put forward by Ollier in The Spartan Mirage: that Sparta was unusual amongst Greek poleis, in that it was unusually cruel, authoritarian and socially stratified.

I was told by someone who seemed to know that this view of Sparta as being unusual is now completely put of date and that modern historiography, led by works by Hodgkinson and Powell such as Beyond the Mirage present Sparta as much more alike other poleis in their social and political structure than unlike, and that contemporary accounts of what Sparta was like are fairly untrustworthy.

They seemed to be of the view that this was now the dominant school of modern historiography, but it was also clearly their view, so I wanted to ask a broader field how much of the older "Spartan Mirage" remains?