Obligatory Lior Pachter tweet (https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1431325969411821572) [doesn't mention issue of initialization explictly but it's probably buried in the paper or the cited tweets]
This is the power of ANOVA, CCA, linear regression and factor analysis, etc. It's much, much, much, much harder to shoot yourself in the foot, particularly with experimental data (usage in the social sciences is another bag of johnsons.)