The first thing to point out in response is that Norris didn't just fall out of the sky from nowhere and happen to luck into a full-time race seat at McLaren. Rather it was the culmination of years of hard graft and proven success in junior championships.
He's certainly been lucky to have come from a relatively comfortable background providing him with fully-funded drives, which means money hasn't been the constant all-consuming worry it was for the likes of Albon or Hamilton in their formative years. Has he taken that smooth rise through the ranks for granted? Yet Verstappen and Leclerc have been similarly fortunate in that regard, and no one is questioning their commitment.
Norris did have a stroke of luck when it came to being in the right place at the right time when McLaren decided to carry out a total root-and-branch revamp of their driver line-up for 2019. The extent to which Norris's down-to-earth, sunny disposition and essential 'niceness' had built up genuine popularity among all levels of the squad while he was serving as reserve driver shouldn't be underestimated. It must surely have helped make him a leading - perhaps even obvious - candidate to step into the cockpit for real after the departures of Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne.
At times in 2019, he made mistakes or failed to press his advantage as assertively as he could have done
Even so, Lando's maiden season was always going to be something of a trial by fire. It was inevitable that he would be judged against his vastly more experienced new team mate Carlos Sainz. He could easily have been badly burned by the comparison, and his career over by the end of a single season. That Norris came out just ahead of Sainz in terms of qualifying performances over the 21 races of 2019 is therefore a definite feather in his cap.
Admittedly, Norris fared less well against Sainz in race trim: as with any driver in their first year of F1, he had a lot of racecraft to pick up and learn over the course of the season, and at times he made mistakes or failed to press his advantage as assertively as he could have done. It's why he ended up in 11th place in the drivers standings, with barely more than half the total number of points that Sainz had managed while securing sixth.
But anyone who thinks that Norris isn't taking things seriously really can't have been listening to his post-race self-assessments. Rather than being content to sit back and accept the plaudits and praise, he has at times been brutally and even unnecessarily harsh when analysing his own performance. It's a glimpse behind that earnest, fresh-faced exterior which reveals a young man just as hard, driven and focussed on succeeding in his fledgling career as any of his emerging contemporaries, and gives the lie to the idea that he's content to be the class clown who is only there to cheer everyone up.
But perhaps the biggest area of division between those who love Norris and those who dismiss him as a lightweight lies in his online activities. Critics have complained that too often he's been behaving like a typical teenager locked in his bedroom playing computer games every hour of the night and day, instead of going out and getting a 'proper job'. Such complaints seem oblivious to the fact that for most of his rookie season, Norris really was still just an actual teenager, if hardly a typical one.
