That paper is hard to evaluate because their modal example of a “context file” is a bad practice that arose from early attempts at text-based agent guidance before we recognized that contextual instruction was the aim, not just “context.”
With a “context file” you’re almost guaranteed to add bloat without useful behavior change because it’s just a pre-set list of things that could be good to know about.
So the results of the study don’t generalize to every text file used for instruction or even most.
100%, my tldr from that paper is: never use /init basically