It's a preemptive defense against methodology cynicism seen often on sites including but not limited to Hacker News. I've been guilty of including such defenses myself over the years because I've gotten annoyed with receiving such cynicism.

Look at the top comment on their previous HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839886

Ultimately advocates exist for models and there are incredible financial incentives for some to be advocates, so authors are guaranteed someone being mad if their horse doesn't perform well.

Given that type of reaction is inevitable, it just saves the conversation.

because if you don’t put this disclaimer the top comment is always "Acthually this isn't real science because you didn't publish your P value" so you can't win.

also the article itself is clearly LLM generated though

Indeed, although it is important to note that science is a proper subset of "using reason to solve problems."

Because for its entire existence, the top HN comment on articles is typically a contrarian take or pointing out flaws. This goes double for a study, where people just hunt for some aspect of the methodology they dislike. If you don't address the flaws, then it looks like you never considered them, and the top comment will say that your entire methodology is suspect. It's super predictable to the point that you can harness this kind of reaction to get stuff on the frontpage if you really want to.

Because serious science is hard and valuable for its rigour, and shouldn't be compared with just poking at data to see what happens

tower defense against pedantic autists who miss the social cue of “does it matter?”