It isn’t that old-earthers are trying to force young-earthers to some higher standard than everybody else. They are trying to goad them toward even just meeting any standard at all. The only answers that seem forthcoming from the young-earth side is how certain understandings can conform to their expectation of how early Genesis should be read. And on the science side, instead of providing answers, young-earthism just raises even more questions and ends up falling back on “well - God just forced it to be this way”. The old earthers, while not having all the answers by a long shot (nobody does) … are at least providing some answers to some questions.
You mention plate tectonics. It gives great answers to the question of how certain mineral veins line up from one continent to another across an ocean (like S. America over into Africa). And it also provides great (and calibrated!) answers to magnetic pole reversals that are recorded in the rocks spreading out from the mid-Atlantic ridge. Those are just off the top of my head. There would be a whole lot of detailed questions that plate tectonics is quite an obvious answer for (the Hawaiian Island chain, the actual measured rates of motion of continents now…) But young-earthism on the other hand, doesn’t address any of that, and instead just invokes a miracle from the flood to a sudden division in the time of Peleg - which, instead of explaining anything about our world is instead an “explanation” of how you attempt to force fit it all into your reading of a few verses of scripture.