Bad as in "unrealistic", i.e. lacking details and textures? Probably because they're researchers not 3D game designers. My guess is that it is just showing a standardized raytracing scene from a public research dataset used to compare raytracers.
The scene is demonstrating their "lightpath vectorization". If the claims work out, the real gains are the better use of the full hardware capabilities by vectorizing multiple rays without GPU/SIMD branch divergence - the divergence happens happens when different rays intersect different objects and dramatically slow down parallel work. That should really speed up rendering so allow more rays and create less noise, more detail.