Quite true but skepticism arises from the fact Herodotus was a "reteller". He honestly wrote down what he was told but never checked to see if what he was told was true. Still, a great historian given his times.
And who declared you can’t die in a sandstorm? In the middle of the desert?
Details of his history have been widely derided; his report of how the Egyptians used croc dung for certain eye ailments was hooted and mocked, until recent decades when a naturally occurring antibiotic was discovered in croc dung. Obviously the Egyptians didn’t have microbiology, and must have arrived at the point of trying this out via some kind of magical thinking, but it shows that Herodotus is accurate, with the possible exception of reproducing historical conversations or their gist, such as what the Persian King said — but even those were probably just his reporting something he was told and found credible. He wasn’t without a filter — here and there he mentions the existence of some information that he didn’t find credible, and refused to relay it, which is probably too bad. He relays three different explanations of why the Nile flood comes when it does, including the correct one (melting snows, which he states the least probable), then offers a fourth one of his own, giving a glimpse into the way the ancient Greeks understood their natural world.