Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.

But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.

Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.