Ireland has "hey lads" as a gender-neutral term which surprised me the first few times I heard it.
To be fair, I'm not sure why the original poster included the gender here instead of saying "smart people." The gender thing is a bit off topic.
You are right that "guys" is often accepted ...at least as an informal second person plural. I get the impression this is because English just doesn't have a lot of great options here. Personally, I use "y'all." No matter the company you keep (with the possible exception of a group of CEOs) it works and doesn't make things awkward. That said, contractions like "Y'all'd've" start to get a bit messy and I generally stay away from those ...especially when writing.
Regarding GP, my only guess is that they were virtue signaling because they explicitly went out of their way to make that point. If they really wanted to avoid gendered nouns they could have written "folks", "people", or any number of similar words (kind of like how I'm doing here, by not assuming GP's gender).
In this particular case, the OP could have used 'researchers' and: 1. avoided putting off/distracting people by the use of gendered language; 2. been more precise.
Seems to me that "guys" can refer to a group of men, or to a mixed-gender group, but not to a group of women. So while it's absolutely the case that it can refer to a mixed-gender group, using it that way is still problematic in that it emphasizes men's membership.
P.S. Sez Carl Sagan (more or less).
Bigtime survivor bias.
Am I wrong to think anything that shrinks the search space is good?
So a really clear rejection of the alternative hypothesis is great (which the article advocates for), but most of the time it's the more ambiguous non-rejection of the null (as you put it, actual failure), with a slim chance of bashing the old guard with your probably janky new hypothesis that explains it. They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown... and you don't want to be a Bozo.