Going off my memory... Applebaum sets out to show that A) Stalin intentionally starved the Ukrainians, and B) communist ideology was also a big part of the famine and is something intrinsic in it.

Actual historians dismiss A completely. Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton historian, wrote the definitive work on Stalin. He is most definitely not a pro-communist or pro-Stalin. But he and other real historians reject this idea of an "intentional" famine, it's completely nonsensical and there's not really an evidence for it.

Point B is also not among the scholarly consensus about the famine. Basically, most actual historians boil it down to some combination of factors: environmental, the general impact of mechanization and industrialization, how the USSR specifically implemented these reforms, and the Kulaks destroying things intentionally. How much emphasis you place on each factor depends on which historian you're talking to. I think most cite the environmental factors as very significant. I do think there's certainly some blame re: how the Soviets implemented collectivization, but frankly I think history shows the processes of agricultural mechanization and industrialization is brutal. The USSR and China both did in a few years what capitalist economies did over many decades. But importantly, I don't think most historians regard the famine as some broad indictment of communism, as Applebaum does. Certainly the fact that there weren't really any significant famines afterward in the USSR or China would lend credence to that this was more trying to squeeze all these important changes into a narrow timeframe.

The beef with Applebaum is she clearly knew the story she wanted to tell and then tried to build the evidence around that. If you want to go after consensus opinions of actual historians fine, but you're probably just going to embarrass yourself as Applebaum did. Don't pretend your hit piece is actual scholarship. Of course journalists can write on history. Barbara Tuchmann is the gold standard for this. But importantly, Tuchmann wasn't trying to prove her own views. She was a real journalist and approached he job as a retelling the real histories. This was the opposite approach of Applebaum.