When I last did astrophysics research half a decade ago (as an undergrad) the workflow for doing research boiled down to writing pipelines to clean the data and then have scripts to find interesting candidates and analyse them automatically. It was necessary to filter stuff to reduce false positives, so it's possible this candidate was just missed by such scripts.
It's also possible this star is in some PhD student's dataset and they just haven't published yet. Astrophysics papers in this vein usually focus on techniques for classification and data science so you'd expect to have at least dozens if not hundreds to thousands of interesting stellar objects before you have something worth publishing unless it was some truly novel technique. A paper just saying "we found an exoplanet" isn't particularly interesting these days, as it turns out there are a lot of them.
(I haven't looked at the data and I'm sure my skills have atrophied by now anyway, sadly.)
More power to the guy who did this (astrophysics is probably the most hobbyist-friendly science since a lot of the data is public and the only lab equipment you need is a laptop) but I suspect "ordinary" folks are far more impressed by this than astrophysics folks. A decade or two ago exoplanets were still thought to be very rare but we've since figured out they are quite common and have moved on to cataloguing them.