> It’s as if every researcher in this field is getting high on the small amount of power they have from denying others access to their results.

Even if I give the comment a lot of wiggle room (such as changing "every" to "many"), I don't think even a watered-down version of this hypothesis passes Occam's razor. There are more plausible explanations, including (1) genuine concern by the authors; (2) academic pressures and constraints; (c) reputational concerns; (d) self-interest to embargo underlying data so they have time to be the first to write-it-up. To my eye, none of these fit the category of "getting high on power".

Also, patience is warranted. We haven't seen what these researchers are doing to release -- and from what I can tell, they haven't said yet. At the moment I see "Repositories (coming soon)" on their GitHub page.