Agreed. I think it comes down to the presentation/interpretation of results. The response to "My classifier gets score of X" can be either "wow, that's a good score for a classifier, this method has merit" or "but X is not a good measure of [actual objective]".

So I think it's come down to conflict between

1. Which the author is trying to present 2. What an astute reader might interpret it as 3. What an astute reader might worry an uninformed reader might interpret it as

And my feeling is that, given all the talk about hype in pop-sci, we're actually on point 3 now, even when the author and reader are actually talking about something reasonable. Whereas personally I'm more interested in the research and interpretations from experts, which I find tend to be not so problematic.