1. Ars Technica's (OP website) audience includes tech enthusiast people who don't necessarily have a mental model of LLMs, instruction tuning or RLHF.

2. why would this "study" exist? - for the reason computer science academics conduct study on whether LLMs are empirically helpful in software engineering. (The therapy industrial complex would also have some reasons to sponsor this kind of a research, unlike SWE productivity studies where the incentive is usually the opposite.)