I agree totally with what you say here, but circling back to the original quote from the essay, the author tries to say that any type of result which you cannot explain is not scientific progress, and that is what I disagreed with originally. Often we can get reproducible results about repeatable behavior or phenomena that "just work" without a solid, low-level, reductionist explanation about why, and in those cases, it's totally OK and still counts as valid progress. Similarly, when we try to do reproducibility studies and we cannot replicate a result, that is progress in the sense of ruling out a result, or shifting the burden of evidence back on the original researcher and casting proper doubt on something. Not usually as exciting or effectful as positive results, but progress nonetheless.

I totally agree we live in a world where publication incentives create perverse anti-science problems, with file drawer bias, p-hacking, falsifying data, etc.

I'm just saying that in the essay, the author seems to go waaay too far in claiming that it can only be scientific if you can tack on some type of "explanation" (which, we could even debate what that means and how you could know if you have the 'right' or 'complete' explanation).