Adding one more clarification in case someone reads this text wall:

The "requests" I made was rather harsh, e.g. it might be impossible to check nextstrains's sequencing sources, if this is a real manuscript revision. I honestly probably won't question as harsh if it's a writting for a different topic.

However, given that the author is trying to illustrate a not-very-likely scenario, which being, not only that there's a major lab leak, but also someone has engineered a not yet fully understood non-trivial virus genome to alter its function as desired (note that COVID doesn't have a well established animal model. It would be hard to test a engineered virus even if it exists. In this case, would you assume that it's continuous lab "leak" and only the omicron strain was a success? And if yes, how could all other strains went undetected at all in the past 2 years?), I think scrutiny is justified and should be expected. It is against several odds and you really need some strong evidences to rule out other possibilities.