[simplesamp]

What I fail to understand is that these authors were presumably okay sending the paper to Neurips (a top tier conference). I am assuming this based on the paper being in Neurips submission template. And now when the cat is out of the bag in open they are denouncing it.

[artfulmink]

Honestly not quite a fair assumption. Some schools have students use neurips templates for class submissions (at least my graduate school did), and so these students may have just been using this format out of habit/familiarity.

[simplesamp]

Maybe. But the paper being exact nine pages (page limit of neurips this year) and being put on arxiv just a month after neurips deadline is too much of a coincidence.