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Sharing code doesn't prevent someone else from reimplementing an idea and indeed they should if they rely on results from another publication. If everyone open sources code they wrote during their research then it ought to be easy to tell if someone reimplemented an idea correctly (if their results differ). If they copied the original implementation this should be evident too.

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But people are people and when there's an easy way...

I agree, but at least having implementations in the wild should bring more attention to an idea and scrutiny of that code than none?

If the same results are obtained using different code (or subjects/animals/chemical batches) does it matter as long as the code is doing the same things?

I get the impression that software types are inclined to put way too much significance on the source code. I'm not surprised the author of the linked item in Nature is a software engineer.

I wonder, did scientists in the 1930s publish their scratchpads full of calculations?

There is a massive difference between a scratchpad of calculations, and a simulation involving thousands or millions of data points.

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