No, that's standard boilerplate these days in papers. You have to "sell" the science a bit to reviewers and connect your work to the broader picture. Those in the field usually ignore statements like this.
When I was a research assistant in college I was encouraged for one of my presentations to emphasize safe hydrogen storage as a vehicle fuel source, when really the research was all about how minuscule amounts of hydrogen change the electrical/optical properties of thin metallic films (and desorption was on the order of days). Selling it as a building block for safer hydrogen storage was necessary to get people engaged.
This paper is in Scientific Reports, which is published by Nature but is not regarded as a top-tier journal. It has an impact factor of 5.5 vs. 41 of Nature.
But I would say that "selling the science" occurs more often for high-profile journals because the authors need to convince the reviewers that the paper has a significant impact. Papers in more field-specific journals tend to write conservatively.