more important than this study if done correctly is the fact that he built a framework that can ingest all this data and that he had access to all these datasets

typical hedge fund spends millions of dollars in order to build such frameworks and buying datasets, sure most academic papers fail if you replicate but the framework and datasets are very valuable because you can eventually find something on your own or an improvement on existing ideas if you keep trying hard enough + there are other sources of ideas like quant research from brokers, ideas from platforms like quantopian etc. but yea in general if you have an outstanding idea that works - you would have very less or no incentive to publish it. why would jim simons have his researchers publish anything when they can make money for him all day long everyday ... just my 2 cents.