Supply chain attacks are the security buzzthreat of day, at least since Solarwinds. Mucking about with the Linux kernel would be a really juicy target for nation-state actors. If you wanted to study this risk, how would you go about doing it?

I haven't done kernel work since BSD4.3 so my opinion isn't particularly interesting. With that said, I would agree that the researchers were naive and their approach has caused collateral damage. However, I'd also argue that the (apparent) topic of research is quite valid. There are a lot of extremely well funded adversaries who are quite talented at obfuscation. "Be careful out there."