It certainly shows alcohol isn’t the limiting factor. Anyone could change any number of things to be as healthy as those folks, but for whatever reason academics instead insist alcohol is the problem.
If the best software engineers in the role all consistently use rubber duck debugging, it may not be the case that rubber duck debugging is what makes them the best software engineers in the world, but it’d take a whole lot more evidence than some academic on a podcast saying “rubber duck debugging is harmful to software engineers” to convince me it isn’t at least worth a shot.