I think the parent is saying that the statement:

    Looking at prime numbers written in base 3 — in which roughly half the primes end in 1 and half end in 2 — he found that among primes smaller than 1,000, a prime ending in 1 is more than twice as likely to be followed by a prime ending in 2 than by another prime ending in 1

is not interesting (as it seems to be just numerology), UNLESS the authors' conjecture is also true (that the statement also holds for bases > 2).

The important part is that the authors (and several others) have verified the statistics out to a few hundred billion primes -- and that while the bias does start to drop out, it does so "very slowly." That's what makes this result not "numerology."

No, it would be interesting even if it only happened in one base. It's still unexpected.

It's interesting to me.

P!=NP would still be interesting even if it were proven false.

They might come down a notch, but "failed" conjectures can still be quite interesting, in many ways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertens_conjecture

"not proven true" is not the same as "proven false"

they made an observation and a conjecture. If the conjecture is proven false, it's obvious uninteresting. If the conjecture isn't proven either way, it could be argued that it's just apophenia. I'm not sure I agree, but it's not an unreasonable stance.