Did they though?

Yes they did. A study that is so poorly designed that one year's variation in data is enough to completely change its conclusions is a bad study.

You appear to willingly ignore all the decades of research

The plural of anecdote is not data. They're best ignored if they're of similar quality to the study you linked.

and dismiss the other one

I tend to dismiss spurious findings based on statistical artifacts.

the time consuming process of doing actual analysis and peer review

Article published February 8. Blog post published February 11. Not sure that I'd call grabbing a CSV off GitHub and plugging it into SPSS time consuming.

It's not a malicious act, it's the way research works.

Can we be real for a second? The way research is supposed to work is that if someone publishes something like this they take appropriate action when they become aware that their result may be based on a statistical artifact. Depending on what stage of the process they're in, that could mean revising or postponing, publishing negative results, withdrawing before publication, or notifying the community if it's already been published. But we both know that rarely happens because the prestige incentives and scientific incentives are misaligned. Publish or perish, retraction is not a good look, etc.