I'm actually not sure that they don't actually mean exponentially. There's something about not only increasing the distance, but potentially also the modulation (and thus the symbol rate) stepping down, which maybe in total causes the decline to be ~exponential? But it's not clear to me at all. That's why I ask, I have a hard time parsing it.

But then again, the sentence uses the term "signal strength", not "throughput", so that would suggest quadratically. But I guess "signal strength" could be meant colloquially and mean more than just the raw signal power received by the antenna, here.

It's all very fuzzy to me, as it stands.