[cauch]

That's not a "appeal to authority", just that reliable conclusions require people who have dedicated enough thoughts on the subject to avoid basic mistakes.

You have exactly the same thing in software development: a closed source software released by an unknown small team that makes surprising claims and that show clues that the authors don't really understand what they are doing is also not trusted.

[cwmoore]

I’m not sure where to fit in the article’s referenced “Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics”

It seems to be a statement making a statement. The rubric is not scientific, but persuasive. I think you are approaching the topic in a particularly narrow context.