It’s perfectly reasonable to say you’ve increased dimensionality when you find a new physical property to store things with. If a CHS-addressed HD tomorrow starts using opacity or depth as a way to store 2 bits in each, obviously the dimensionality has increased.

In ML, we regularly accept 100+d data (much higher for imaging applications). Even simple mechanical systems have large state vectors.

I’m a regular critic of university systems but this isn’t the university making stuff up because it sounds impressive.

(Additional evidence: one of the authors is a Microsoft employee, not an academic employed by the University of Southampton.)