I understand caution and skepticism...but how on earth is that the “relevant sentence” out of the whole article?

I would vote for the first one:

“Hospitalized patients with advanced COVID-19 and lung involvement who received remdesivir recovered faster than similar patients who received placebo, according to a preliminary data analysis from a randomized, controlled trial involving 1063 patients.”

So we know it was randomized with a control group and sample size of over 1000 patients. That’s a first step towards reaching statistical significance.