Speculation: The biggest reason for solar farms often being unpopular with locals is that, socially, they feel like dystopian giga-scale machines. Serving some far-away, unfriendly power. Utterly disinterested in the welfare, or even lives, of the local populace.
Vs. almost any other business (farm, mine, oil drilling, warehouse, whatever) would both hire far more local people, and interact far more with the local community.
Is it intentional that you're listing export-based business as "local" while that solar farm probably does supply the town? It's a beautiful contrast either way.
All the businesses produce fungible commodities, and feed those into distribution systems ~10000X larger than the town. So, socially, it does not matter where any given ear of corn, gallon of milk, or watt of electricity ends up.
If your next door neighbor worked on the production line at a tire factory, how much would it change your social relationship with him if half of those tires were being exported, or sold to manufacturers of ICE cars?
Or - maybe you're an introvert, or live in a place where it's normal to have no social relationships with your neighbors. If so, try talking to somebody who has lived in a small farming community. It is a very, very different world.
This sounds very specific to your experience and viewpoint developed via whatever small farming community you have experience of.
I've had six decades around rural communities, mostly in Australia, often in far flung parts of the world, there are few here that feel solar farms are dystopian giga-scale machines, mostly they think of them as dual use for pasture and additional guaranteed farm income.
Raised panels make the moisture retention better, increase the nutritional value of the ground cover and makes for better wool - all positives.
Point. I was mostly speaking to the parts of America which are hostile to solar farms.
OTOH, it sounds like your experience is with solar/farming dual-use. Vs. America seems inclined to a "buy the land, kick off the farmers, put up the panels, and post the No Humans Allowed signs" monoculture model. Which can be all to easy to scale up & do, from a Wall Street point of view.
( FWiW the counter arguments raised in anticipation in that three plus year old article didn't come to fruition in the time since across many sites - we do pay attention to water tables here in Australia following disastrous effects of over clearing for 80 years that ended some 50 years past )
The largest current complaint hereabouts in the farming community is the looming onset of a mega garbage dump for the nearest city. It's promised to be well sealed and well maintained, but local people are upset by the intrusion of convoys of garbage from the city - more noise and traffic than a few thousand hectares of solar panels.
Every new construction is always unpopular with locals. Farms smell. Businesses produce traffic and emit noise. Oil and gas annoy people for miles around with flaring. Heck, even pro-social ventures like pubs serving the local populace get complaints from other members of the local populace. This only gets mitigated by the social factor after something has existed for a long time.
Personally I like seeing renewables, big or small, cleanly producing energy for us to use. It's a small pro-social signal about environmental responsibility.
Vs. almost any other business (farm, mine, oil drilling, warehouse, whatever) would both hire far more local people, and interact far more with the local community.