It's very much believable, to me.
In image generation, it's fairly common to add "masterpiece", for example.
I don't think of the LLM as a smart assistant that knows what I want. When I tell it to write some code, how does it know I want it to write the code like a world renowned expert would, rather than a junior dev?
I mean, certainly Anthropic has tried hard to make the former the case, but the Titanic inertia from internet scale data bias is hard to overcome. You can help the model with these hints.
Anyway, luckily this is something you can empirically verify. This way, you don't have to take anyone's word. If anything, if you find I'm wrong in your experiments, please share it!