I think maybe what the article is saying is that they didn't test giving Adalimumab early, so they don't know if that is as clinically effective as the Infliximab that they did test early.
I can tell you that Adalimumab is going to be at least as effective as Infliximab, and probably marginally better, at a minimum. This will obviously vary by patients, but Adalimumb is simply a superior design (it has comparable-to-somewhat-superior epitope conformation/selectivity, and has a humanized Fc part which has a much more favourable immunologic profile), and tends to statistically outperform.
They both have roughly the same target, but Adalimumab is a more recent, technologically superior in every way, design. I'm frankly not 100% sure why any doctor would want to start someone on Infliximab in 2024 if Adalimumab was also available. I think the kind of doctor who does this is the kind of doctor who hasn't caught wind of the fact that early treatment with the best biologics leads to better patient outcomes (this is not the first paper that suggests this, it's a trend in clinical research that dates back at least 15 years). More traditionally, Infliximab was given first, and patients who failed that treatment were then "ramped up" to the equivalent but superior Adalimumab.
Nowadays the state of the art is to start with Adalimumab right off the bat, or even better, one of the newer biologics: either an integrin targeting one like Natalizumab or Vedolizumab (I admit to not being as up to date on this therapeutic avenue as I am on the others), or an IL23/IL12 targeting one like Ustekinumab (although the latter has already been obsoleted by the more p19-selective Risankizumab).
> I'm frankly not 100% sure why any doctor would want to start someone on Infliximab in 2024 if Adalimumab was also available.
My gastro says he simply sees better results on infliximab than he does on adalimumab across all his patients, so he tends to start people on the former first. I think the fact that it's an infusion versus a shot does make a difference. AFAIK very few of his patients end up failing infliximab and switching to adalimumab, other than the ones who don't respond to TNFis period.
(Worth noting here that I actually was on twice-monthly adalimumab prior to getting a Crohn's DX, so I'm definitely one of those people for whom infliximab is a better choice. The adalimumab helped with spondylitis pain to an extent, but GI imaging at the time still came back definitively Crohn-y!)