[poomer]

As someone who's spent a lot of years in an academic social science field and in analytics/modeling more generally, I feel strongly that most educated people have way too much trust in academic literature.

Outright generated data like this is rare and dumb, instead it's very common to play around with data cleaning/variable selection/modeling assumptions to get whatever result you want. I've seen it from grad students, tenured academics, DS/MLE in big tech, basically anywhere where you mix high pressure & neurotic personalities with analytics work.