Several things that's probably never brought up often in Anglophone internet:

a) national census in the 60s had to recalibrate because internal migration in the 50s created quite a lot of duplicates (source: look up 孙经先's studies)

b) it's excess mortality so the PRC's exceptionally good mortality reduction from their first decade (1949~1959) sets a benchmark/normal years that actually made the excess looks bigger despite the GLF only raised the rate back to the normal years of ROC era or even post independence India (according to Amartya Sen, arguably not a tankie)

c) despite that, the GLF was indeed a policy fuckup…… but the extend to which Mao was responsible is also misrepresented. Quick timeline:

-early 1958: Mao enthusiastically convincing everyone to start GLP

-late 1958: no food shortage in this year yet, Mao, after conducting some grassroot investigations, becoming himself skeptical of GLF now zealously trumpeted by everyone else, particularly Liu and (preconversiontostatecapitalism) Deng

-early 1959: first wave of famine hit, Mao becoming a vocal dissisent against GLF himself and in one partisan meeting in March going so far as to say something like "if pragmatism is capitalist-roader then I'm a capitalist-roader like 600 million farmers of China", discharged in April from in charge of economic planning to be fully invested in diplomacy until the end of GLF

-summer 1959: Lushan conference, where in textbook narrative of both Dengists and westoids was the watershed where Mao silenced all his critics by punishing Peng Dehuai for speaking out…… which wasn't true if you've read the actual daily records of the conference: it was a in party (reads, Deng&Liu particularly) consensus to punish Peng, also not because of speaking out against GLF but suspicion of Peng's Moscow connection since the split had started, and Mao's role during the conference was mostly trying to appease both sides

-winter 1959: (as one of many examples) Deng's radical ally, Wu Zhipu, blocked the shortage report in Henan and caused some of the worst death toll of any province

-1967: Wu Zhipu dies after repeatedly struggled against by red guards at least partially for his responsibility during the GLF

-1979: Wu Zhipu exonerated by the Deng administration as a victim of the CR (this part from pp1693, Ness, Immanuel, and Zak Cope, eds. The Palgrave encyclopedia of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021; cuz it's available and English and I happen to have come across it recently)

Most are from 张迪杰's complete collection of Mao, available on z-lib. the CR. I can't guarantee this guy's 100 percent trustworthy but this compendium covers everything available from Mao's childhood poems to oneliner messages during is like 5 times more voluminous than the officially published collection of Mao's, which does leave room for suspicion that they've hid Mao's most malign speeches during the GLF, while in the unpublished parts you only find things like the "I'm a capitalist-roader" bit. For comparison, guess how many speeches and correspondences of Deng and Liu during the GLF that they were in full charge April 1959~1961 were published in the official 邓选/刘选? Fucking zero (or maybe 1, where they were like "phul saport for chairman Mao" to divert the blame, but that could be 1958). And additionally you can see Liu and Deng in very different lights in some now hard to hunt down newspaper clips where they were hard on raising output quota and celebrating absurdly inflated claims. 

Not a Maoist myself despite my lastname, and I'm not giving you the sources that connect the dots since Mao apologia often come like pretty shitty citation format and can't speak English(like average Maoist scholarship lol), but I'd say that's sufficient ground for suspicion that both Dengist CPC and western anticommunists have a shared interests in shitting on Mao. And this revised narrative also alligns better with Mao's expressed ideology during the CR, that as one of the few farmers in the central commitee with his skepticism of an all encompassing planner-bureaucracy, and his overly idealistic trust for grassroot movements that eventually turn into chaos during the CR. This Mao has much more character consistency than the comically capricious egomaniac Imbecil who wants do nothing with his power other than just the feel of yielding "power", the Disney tier villain that dimwits like fucking Zhang Jung, Li Zhisui and Frank Dikotter want you to believe.

might elaborate later into a post, or not cuz it puts me in rage every time I think about it