I am sorry, but when did the Silph Road group stop doing research and started doing journalism? I am generally one of the first ones to grab a front seat (with popcorn) in the "Let's bash NIantic" bandwagon, but this article/research does not proof its claim in the title of the post at all. It does not confirm that there is absolutely no change but merely assumes that the lucky rate very likely stayed the same based on only 1400 data points with only 72 successes with a 99% confidence interval between 3.7% to 6.7%.

This merely proofs that the lucky rate is not as high as last year, which is fair enough and expected, assuming that Niantic most likely also accounted for the (slight) boost in lucky friends to balance out the overall rate of luckies coming into the game. The increase might only be a slight one (10-20%) this time (which is easily within the realm of possibility with that little data points), accompanied with another slight increase to lucky friends and until more data is collected to fully support and actually confirm a "zero increase" claim, that claim should not be made.

I don't understand people for blaming Niantic for supposedly not drastically increasing the lucky chance (even a 10% increase from 5% to 5.5% is an increase), while Niantic pulls off something like the current shift in the 7km egg pool with a what seems to be < 10% chance to hatch chance for Darumaka, which is much more concerning as people pay actual money to "play" the "content".