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While due to the overall reproducibility crisis in psychology I wouldn't put one dollar on this, it's would make some sense.

A person (or a dog) could at any moment start pushing/punching/biting in the direction it is looking at, so it's important to keep track of. In a sense, visual attention predates later force.

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I think it's more likely to be a component of bootstrapping intelligence when you're a baby, by having having built-in algorithms telling you what those around you are looking at.

We already know that wolves and dogs use gaze tracking for communication and cooperation during hunting.

I've seen that people are quite good at tracking the gaze of others for mating purposes. Who is looking at whom and how they are looking is all quite interesting and informative.

it's probably very very important evolutionary to know if the lion is looking at you or the gazelle 5 meters to the left. (and also very frustration-inducing for people who have strabismus)

It's probably very important in the evolutionary context to know if a potential mate is looking at you or the potential rival next to you.

how so? if you are talking about males, it doesnt matter who the females are looking, the strongest male will fight or dominate the other males and get the females anyway. If it is females, well the females dont really need to compete for male attention. a look from a potential predator on the other hand is an immediate and lethal threat.

that's probably a more logical explanation than "people envision an imaginary beam of force". First, they 'd have to control for that by including people who had no cultural knowledge of a laser beam.

The history of theories of vision contains repeated cases of "extramission" hypotheses, even if you don't believe that 50% of adults now subscribe to a folk "emission" theory of vision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)

Most proponents of the theory lived before lasers were invented, though not before the first sunbeams, jets of water, shouts etc.

Extramission is mainly the idea that light illuminates from the eyes though, not that it generates some force, which is the hypothesis in the article.

The article actually claims that "One of the most common extramission beliefs is that people can “feel” someone else’s gaze as a pressure or heat on the skin." so I don't think your original point (that people were more likely to be tracking gaze to anticipate action) corresponds to the facts. Now, the claim I've quoted could be false, but it's not presented as a hypothesis, but as an explanandum.

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