The disk size does not matter, and when the severity was actually determined it would show up in the headlines as "Boeing leak determined to be a level 3 leak" instead of just being "That boeing leak 5 months ago was kinda bad".
Either way, listing the size says very little.
Relevant quote from the article: "I haven’t gone over the whole data set but Boeing emails and a few others stand out as useful for those with malicious intent"
Both journalists and the public need a better way to understand how different breaches affect them.
If anything this would create two stories where there now is one, so journalists would not have less or later to report.
What does autism have to do with having the professional integrity to understand what it is you're writing about before publishing sensational claims?
They leaked 45 GB of data. That is all that is known, and therefore all that can be reported. Anything else is speculation until an investigation is done. That would be for a later followup report.
And second, even if a company has no idea of the scope, the hackers would somehow want to prove at least privately what the scope was, else their threat is not as manipulative as it could be. On the other hand, the hackers can't credibly bluff and inflate the scope too far beyond reality because the company can just say "prove it or I don't believe you and I won't pay." And the hackers want to get paid.
It's a business deal after all. A really crappy one involving criminals. But at the end of the day, the company must have already assessed the value of the leak in order to reach a decision.
I've seen companies say this sort of thing with high confidence. But that seems hard to me, assuming some level of administrative access was breached.