I don't think you have to argue for junk DNA to state that the article in question fails utterly to explain the findings except by way of not being the straw-man "junk".

Yes, we find the significance of DNA by knocking it out and seeing what happens.

Yes, crispr/cas-9 or /cas13 can be used for knocking out.

Yes, it's interesting to compare across models to find relatively conserved behaviors.

That's all known and done.

What could be interesting about these results is exactly how they achieved scale and variety at reasonable time and cost. Labs typically build expertise in a particular model organism, and it's very hard to get things right in many cell types, no less to run essentially thousands of experiments. Developers have a vague sense of 3nm semiconductor process and the potential for on-chip memory (both yield/quality and potential), but we (I) have no sense how good the process is underlying findings like this.