Essentially nothing: for an individual? Yes. For a population? No.
You or I may not care about a 0.62% increased CVD rate for ourselves over 30 years, but that does translate to 6,200 extra possibly-preventable cases of CVD per million people. That's about 76,000 diagnoses annually in the US alone.
So, yes, this tiny effect size means nothing.
Moreover, this tiny effect size could be much smaller than noises in the data.
Of course, this study says nothing about what happens if you try to change behavior, that seems like an entirely unrelated point.
Taken together, I’m not sure how you can be so confident that a small effect size therefore means nothing.
How would this compare, for example, to not smoking, drinking less alcohol, wearing sunscreen, safe sex, not exercising enough, etc.
(Picked things that I think we have a high standard of evidence for and fairly large effect, but that people often neglect due to wanting to do the harmful activity, as with red meat)
For years low salt recommendations were justified based on lessened harm "on a population level" even if individual gains were small. Now it seems that these recommendations were wrong, according to Cochrane reviews.
I basically read this as "it's ok to eat meat/sausages/whatever".
If it is noise/invalid/a mistake, it means nothing; the actual effect might actually be a DECREASE of CVD as far as we know.
And it is important to also look at all cause mortality; such studies have often shown a decrease in CVD but the same final number of deaths...