[robotresearcher]

"was lower but not in a significant way"

By convention, this means "indistinguishable from", so reporting that it is lower is an unsupported claim. They would be equally justified in reporting that it was higher, ie. not at all.

[jjcon]

It was lower though, just not significantly so (depending on your threshold for significance) - that's the standard way of reporting it. You can't just chunk part of the sentence and take issue with it, the sentence in it's entirety is accurate.

[robotresearcher]

Yes I agree that the sentence is accurate.

Perhaps I’m too zealous about it, and maybe the conventions vary, but I was trained to avoid using words like ‘lower’ here.