No, no it's not. The product here is an academic paper. The code is just kind of a sanity check for the concepts in the paper. That's how academia works.
If you're positioning it as a product, which is how many here perceived it, that reasoning doesn't hold. Not that every product has good testing, but they should...
I don't really agree that "that's how academia works". What other recent reference papers for cryptographic primitives are you thinking about when you say that?
I don't have any in mind, but this paper struck me as being in "distributed systems" more than in "cryptographic primitives." That is totally debatable, though.
Anyway, I have experience in the former field (and adjacent fields) but not the latter, so that's where my cynicism is coming from, if you are wondering.
You are probably right that there are higher standards for papers dealing with cryptographic primitives. That would be nice!