You absolutely can, and as you can see in this paper it is absolutely do-able to measure the resistance of these materials. They measure an insulator with something on the order of 10^6 ohm m. For reference, copper has a resistivity of ~ 10^(-8) ohm m, so there are about 14 orders of magnitude of difference. This does make the contact resistance pretty negligible in this case too.
I have the same thoughts. I think it's because they are not EEs and want to play with the material. A sensing resistor is trivial.