The corrections that run through these articles are not received wisdom; they are the product of a specific and comparatively recent body of scholarship, and it is worth knowing whose.
The decisive figure is Michael Dummett, a philosopher of language who spent much of his life documenting the tarot as a card game. The Game of Tarot, published in 1980, traces the game from fifteenth-century Ferrara to the present, establishes the regional families of trump order, and demonstrates by ordinary historical method that the cards were played with for roughly three and a half centuries before anyone is recorded using them to divine.
He then wrote the history of the other side. A Wicked Pack of Cards, with Ronald Decker and Thierry Depaulis in 1996, and A History of the Occult Tarot, with Decker in 2002, reconstruct how the esoteric tradition was built: who invented which claim, in what year, and out of what materials. The occult tarot turns out to have an excellent documentary record, precisely because its inventors published.
Alongside that sits Stuart Kaplan's encyclopedic cataloguing of surviving decks, begun in the 1970s, which supplies the physical evidence the arguments run on.
None of this scholarship is hostile to reading cards. Dummett was dismissive of the occult claims but exact about them, and the effect of the work is not to discredit divinatory practice but to date it honestly. A practice that began around 1750 and matured in the 1890s is not less interesting for being three hundred years old rather than three thousand.