The entire point of the study was to see what kind of context files were useful and which were useless,

The title of the Pivot-to-AI article is: “Your AGENTS.md file doesn’t actually do anything”

These two statements don’t jive.

So when you say that they “admitted that they started with useless context files”, you are referring to the results of the study. Complaining that they didn’t base their study on the conclusions of that very study is just absurd

This is the difference between “we found a lot of useless AGENTS.md files” and “AGENTS.md files cannot possibly be useful at all”. The second is the argument the article is making. The first is the argument the research paper is making, which like most things on the Internet, is effectively a tautology. Most of the internet is useless, and most people are too criminally stupid to even operate a computer.