There's lots of papers, vast numbers, that very clearly miss basic premises about the data generating process; and about what exactly we're modelling and how. Premises drilled into statisticians, and so on -- but omitted from a computer science education; and esp. from much of the route into these fields today.
Absent these, the process, i'm sure, appears very mystical.
This paper ought ask, "what assumptions about the data generating process ought we make such that these regularisation conditions work"
I really do think that the question isnt phrased this way due to "too much kool-aid" --- its a paper which seems, to me, to already buy into a kind of mystification.
Though, this may just be a symptom of not thinking about the problem from the pov of formal/traditional stats. The paper seems to be wanting some sort of "cute conceptual answer" that might appear in a hand-wavey ML paper
But the answer is to specify families of distributions whose semantic and non-sematic structures are "accessible" by these unsupervised techniques -- find which families do not work, which ones do... and then formulate an essentially psych-social hypothesis as to why the people creating htat data have used those distributions
People in the space say that all the time, but they're talking about it with other experts, not posting about it on HN in public. I don't think the opinions of random pseudonymous posters carries much weight considering some of the things these people seem to think about ML.
There's a certain cultural heritage on HN, maybe across broad swaths of the tech world IRL, of speaking purely speculatively but phrasing it as presumed fact. I call this behavior "high-school debate club" but the more classical name for it is Dunning-Kruger. It seems to have a regrettably outsized effect on the discourse in the more influential (if still naive) echelons of tech, either as an extension of a broad blind optimism or as a way to stave off feelings of loneliness that are pervasive in these industries by appealing to and seeking approval of the prestigious community that HN is purported to be.