This is more about repeatable experiments than particular movements.
Regarding the price, the actuators seem to be ~240USD. A good stepper motor with the appropriate feedback mechanism to make it suitable for servo-like control plus a modern stepper motor controller that is suited for the robotics context will likely not be (much) cheaper and you have to hack together the servo functionality, tune settings, etc. - which seems detrimental if the goal is repeatability accross teams. I'm not in the target audience for these robots either but from the perspective of robustness and repeatable research they don't look too shabby.
Regarding the price, the actuators seem to be ~240USD. A good stepper motor with the appropriate feedback mechanism to make it suitable for servo-like control plus a modern stepper motor controller that is suited for the robotics context will likely not be (much) cheaper and you have to hack together the servo functionality, tune settings, etc. - which seems detrimental if the goal is repeatability accross teams. I'm not in the target audience for these robots either but from the perspective of robustness and repeatable research they don't look too shabby.