Just like you can have all kinds of optical aberrations, does the same go for radio based observations?
For instance, isn't it odd that most of them happen to lie in the vertical direction of this particular observatory across many lightyears of distance?
However, in this case the brighter filaments have been observed for decades, the wide angle view of this image is from 1989 from the VLA array in New Mexico with some data augmentation from Spitzer space telescope.
https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/
The MeerKAT study just increases the resolution and signal to noise ratio, which has allowed us to see many more of them, but we can see the 'old' ones as well. The emission phenomena is pretty well understood AFAIK, the mystery just being mostly when/why/how they got there.
The other thing to keep in mind is that these filaments are huge in the night sky. The image we see is a mosaic of many observations that spans 3.5 x 2.5 degrees. The moon is ~.5 degrees, or about the same size as that giant bubble on the lower right.
Here's the paper. I just scanned through it and its relatively approachable - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf
Edit: Check out the section 'OBSERVATIONS AND DATA PROCESSING'
It's not that I doubt that astrophysicists take this into account, I'm sure they do! But when we see an "image of a black hole", that's really a gazillion data points from a multitude of different observatories, processed by human made algorithms with human made models and biases, and it happens to look just like we expected - how do we know it's not just our assumptions that made it into the processing and modelling?
Again, I'm sure every astrophysicist ever has thought about this and knows how it's handled, so it's not a criticism. I'd just love to read more about it, as a layperson :)