Good point on nuance on a technical level, i.e., debunked != failure to support relationship.
However, on a practical level, people throw this around as if it were empirically supported (which doesn't seem to be the case). If there have been hundreds of studies failing to make the connection, I won't take the bet that it will eventually get validated.
On a meta-level, that's also a weird quote.
> But the fact that contexting has not been empirically validated should not necessarily be construed as a failure of the theory
Pick any theory. If you can't validate it, and plenty of people have tried to validate it, then that's a failure of the theory, right?