It's disheartening that what is essentially a fully synthetic study (using the opinions of 10 people that mostly aren't programmers to train a model that only examines literal commit activity and then come to a conclusion that many thousands of people do nothing at work all day and can be safely laid off) can be used to grab headlines in this way.

PR firms all over the world are taking very detailed notes about this, since it's a template to push essentially any narrative they want about anything but with the veneer of it being a "study" and therefore in some sense scientific and rational. This will only further tarnish the brand of science and rationality.