Medical professional here. No, it isn't weird.

First of all, as mentioned below, we do know enough about how to get muscles to grow bigger. A lot of the crazed obsession over reps, sets, rest periods, protein timing, etc, is just stupid. The finding "discovered" here is intuitive. We know that if you measure strength as single rep max, as this article did, then lower reps are more effective for that. (On the other hand if you measured it as the weight you can use for 100 reps with good form, higher reps would be better.) Now let's use logic. If you did a set of eight and then rested for five seconds and did another set of eight, that would really be a set of sixteen with a brief pause. Somehow the rest time has to be long enough that there was adequate recovery. I think everybody already know that. I think everybody already knew that if I use a weight to do 25 reps, but I pause for a second every five reps, that's not doing five sets of five. So there must be some minimum rest between sets. It seems that one minute is not quite enough, but three minutes is. On the plus side one minute was pretty effective as well, so if you prefer one minute, no big deal.

Second of all, this isn't a medical problem, except when people have a medical need to build muscle. If one guy is having a myocardial infarction, one guy has acute leukemia, and one guy is perfect healthy but wants to have more muscle, who should medical practice and research resources be used on.

This is analogous to the wrong claim that doctors don't promote prevention. Sure we do. It's just that one, it's pretty easy to avoid the major health risks, there are a lot of different ways to be healthy (one person might be a vegan natural bodybuilder, another person might eat a "healthy Nordic diet" http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/diet-weight-loss/article/new-nordic-diet and do mainly yoga and hiking, they'd both be good lifestyles) and two, our main job is to deal with people who are sick right now. Some of them had behavioral risk factors and got sick, many of them didn't have behavioral risk factors and got sick anyway.