Knowing what I know about LLMs, from their internal architecture and from extensive experience working with them daily, I would find this kind of result highly surprising and in a clear violation of my mental model of how these things work. And I'm very far from an expert.

If a purported expert in the field can is willing to credulously publish this kind of result, it's not unreasonable to assume that either they're acting in bad faith, or (at best) are high on their own supply regarding what these things can actually do.