This study was conducted in China, which has a very different government structure compared to much of the West (or pretty much anywhere), so I fail to see how this can be applied to Western democracies (where the article was published).
There are many examples of laws being widely ignored and the government eventually giving up on enforcement and/or changing the law to conform to popular behavior. Good examples in the U.S. include prohibition, homosexuality, cannabus, speeding, illegal immigration... In all the cases some government decided enforcement or laws should be weakened in the face of popular noncompliance. There are many more examples as this is quite common.
In any case, the information pertained mostly to the interactions between individuals and municipal authorities. I don't know that those relationships are really so disparate here and abroad. The political structure may differ, but the dynamic is probably very similar to what you see in democracies with a low voter-participation rate: aggregate everyday behavior winds up being a better mode of communication between the group and the authority than election results or town-hall meetings.
And there may be something to be said for covert noncompliance in a democracy where strongly polarized political parties shoot down visible campaigns the moment they take off. Civil disobedience (openly democratic) is about kickstarting the political process, swaying society in the hopes of swaying their representatives. But civil noncompliance (covertly democratic) is about bypassing politics entirely, forcing authorities to either punish the community at large or acknowledge the impotence of the law in question.
This is all very stream-of-consciousness on my end, hopefully it's coming across with some clarity.
Quantitative is just a style of argument, and it alone can be used to argue for or against good or bad science. E.g. at the onset the Copernican Revolution, quantitative arguments actually were stronger for the Ptolemaic model. The core body of science, however, is a complex of evidence-gathering, hypothesis generation, and hypothesis testing, that collectively generate new sources of and frames for evidence. There's no particular reason that you've got to be able to build an isomorphism between a class of evidence and a numeric type in order for that evidence to be valuable and scientific.
On the other hand, I find it hard to argue with the observation that doing science with numbers seems to lead to a better and healthier scientific community (better in the sense of making testable predictions that pass their tests and suggest new lines of evidence).
> There's no particular reason that you've got to be able to build an isomorphism between a class of evidence and a numeric type in order for that evidence to be valuable and scientific.
As you hinted at, the experiment has been unofficially done many times and the evidence suggests the quantitative approach is better. That is the particular reason as far as I can tell. (Numbers may not be technically essential, but measurement and comparison are. That leads to things like everybody agreeing that a piece of metal in Europe is exactly one kilogram and everybody talks about mass in reference to that one object. It was a qualitative decision to choose which kilogram became the standard, but from then on measuring mass was quantitative and easily communicable. Fields that can't establish conventions for their observables in this way are generally not very scientific.)
My argument was that when holding the field constant puts qualitative and quantitative science on the same footing, it's a bad sign for that field. Take chemistry: when qualitative arguments were equal to quantitative it was called Alchemy. When quantitative approaches took over it changed the world.